Science

A new breakthrough has allowed physicists to create a beam of atoms that behaves the same way as a laser, and that can theoretically stay on “forever”. This might finally mean the technology is on its way to practical application, although significant limitations still apply. Nevertheless, this is a huge step forward for what is

As people age, their immune systems naturally begin to decline. This aging of the immune system, called immunosenescence, may be an important part of such age-related health problems as cancer and cardiovascular disease, as well as older people’s less effective response to vaccines. But not all immune systems age at the same rate. In our

When a star dies, what happens to its planets? Well, if that star is a certain white dwarf 86 light-years away, those planets are currently in the process of being torn apart and eaten by the star, like some grotesque cosmic performance of Kronos devouring his children. This is not entirely unusual for white dwarfs.

A historic drought affecting Italy’s largest river has brought a World War II-era shipwreck to light. The Po River runs 405 miles (651.8 km) from the Cottian Alps to empty into the Adriatic Sea. It’s currently facing its worst drought in 70 years, which has caused a decades-old sunken ship to resurface. The Zibello, a

The National Space Intelligence Center will be run by a new Space Force unit, Space Delta 18 WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force on June 24 plans to formally establish the National Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.  The NSIC will be run by a new Space Force unit, Space Delta 18,

Up to 12 feet (3.7 meters) in length and with a fierce, aggressive attitude, two new species of giant dwarf crocodile that have just been identified by scientists are not ones you would have wanted to encounter during the Early and Middle Miocene. These beasts would have roamed parts of Africa between 15 and 18

A few years ago, deep beneath the Apennine Mountains in Italy, a team of physicists hunted for flashes of light that just might suggest human consciousness is the product of gravitational forces. The fact they came up empty-handed doesn’t mean we’re all meat computers with no free will; it does make the quest for a suitable

The Colombian army released images of one of the world’s most valuable shipwrecks, the location of which was unknown for nearly three centuries. Spain’s San Jose galleon was loaded with a vast cargo of treasure when it was sunk by British navy ships in 1708 during the War of the Spanish Succession. The ship, a

Something weird is going on with the Sun. So far, almost every day in 2022 it has erupted in flares and coronal mass ejections, some of which were the most powerful eruptions our star is capable of. By itself, an erupting Sun is not weird. It erupts regularly as it goes through periods of high and low

By now, few people question the reality that humans are altering Earth’s climate. The real question is: How quickly can we halt, even reverse, the damage? Part of the answer to this question lies in the concept of ‘committed warming,’ also known as ‘pipeline warming.’ It refers to future increases in global temperatures that will be

TAMPA, Fla. — Remote communications provider Speedcast is preparing to buy another sizable chunk of satellite capacity as demand soars beyond pre-pandemic levels. Speedcast added 13 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity from satellite operators to its international network in late May, giving it a record 30 Gbps of bandwidth to primarily serve cruise and

A secret population of polar bears in Greenland has been discovered in a seemingly impossible habitat – one that, for most of the year, lacks the floating platforms of sea ice the beasts use to hunt. The unusual group, which scientists previously thought was part of another nearby population, has been hiding in plain sight

A strange gap between theoretical predictions and experimental results in a major neutrino research project could be a sign of the elusive ‘sterile’ neutrino – a particle so quiet, it can only be detected by the silence it leaves in its wake. It’s not the first time the anomaly has been seen, adding to previous

Mastering fire cleared the way into whole new worlds for early humans – from accessing more nutrients through cooking (fueling an increase in brain size), to making the dark hours useful, and surviving migrations into harsher climates. How and when this mastery happened, however, has been lost to time, with fragments of burnt material hinting our

Two new worlds of probable rocky mineral goodness have just been found orbiting a star close to our own cosmic neighborhood. The two newly discovered exoplanets are what are known as super-Earths – bigger than Earth, but smaller than an ice giant – orbiting a cool red dwarf star called HD 260655, which is just

If microplastics have boundaries, we don’t yet know what they are. We seem to find this microscopic trash everywhere we look, from the bottom of the ocean to Earth’s highest peak. We’re starting to figure out why. Beyond all the disturbing discoveries of microplastics turning up inside our bodies, we now know these tiny fragments

A senior software engineer at Google was suspended on Monday (June 13) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) that he claimed to be “sentient”, according to media reports. The engineer, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine, was put on paid leave for breaching Google’s confidentiality policy. “Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call

Soon after a pair of Chinese satellites reached geostationary orbit early this year, space surveillance satellite USA 270 maneuvered to get a closer look at its new neighbors. As USA 270 closed in on Shiyan-12-01 and Shiyan-12-02, the Chinese inspection satellites took off in opposite directions with Shiyan 12 02 moving into position to get

To many members of the feline family, perennial herb catnip (Nepeta cataria) is an irresistible psychoactive treat that induces short bouts of drooling, pawing, and writhing pleasure. Not satisfied with merely rolling among its foliage, many kitties will tear and crumple the leaves, prompting researchers to investigate the purpose of this wanton destruction. What appears

After previously studying the phenomena of two sound waves in quantum liquids, scientists have now observed sound moving at two different speeds in a quantum gas. If you were somehow immersed in the three-dimensional gas used for this study, you would hear every sound twice: each individual sound carried by two different sound waves moving

A British warship that sank in 1682 while carrying a future king has been located off eastern England, in a find described as the ”most significant historic maritime discovery since the raising of the Mary Rose in 1982″. The announcement follows 15 years of secret verification work due to the need to protect the wreck. The

The first detection of what appears to be a rogue black hole drifting through the Milky Way, revealed earlier this year, just got important validation. A second team of scientists, conducting a separate, independent analysis, has reached almost the same finding, adding weight to the idea that we’ve potentially identified a rogue black hole wandering

Climate change is slowing down the conveyor belt of ocean currents that brings warm water from the tropics up to the North Atlantic. Our research, published today (June 6) in Nature Climate Change, looks at the profound consequences to global climate if this Atlantic conveyor collapses entirely. We found the collapse of this system –

A plastic container thrown into landfill can take hundreds of years to break down naturally, but a newly discovered enzyme could eat up the waste in less than a day. The highly efficient polyester hydrolase, known as PHL7, was recently found in a German cemetery munching through compost. In the lab, researchers found it was

Scientists keep on pushing the efficiency of solar panels higher and higher, and there’s a new record to report: a new solar cell has hit 39.5 percent efficiency under the standard 1-sun global illumination conditions. That 1-sun marker is simply a standardized way of measuring a fixed amount of sunlight, and almost 40 percent of

The ocean is swimming in sound, and a new artificial intelligence tool could help scientists sift through all that noise to track and study marine mammals. The tool is called DeepSqueak, not because it measures dolphin calls in the ocean underworld, but because it is based on a deep learning algorithm that was first used

Future fusion reactions inside tokamaks could produce much more energy than previously thought, thanks to groundbreaking new research that found a foundational law for such reactors was wrong. The research, led by physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL), has determined that the maximum hydrogen fuel density is about

Is your tiny robot really all that small if it’s bigger than the width of a coin? A team of scientists has built what is now the smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot, coming in at a mere half a millimeter (less than a fiftieth of an inch) wide. Exceedingly tiny robots have a whole host of

Even if you’re enjoying gloriously fast broadband at home wherever you live in the world, you’re still going to be a long, long way behind the new record for data transmission: an incredible 1.02 petabits per second. That’s a million gigabits shifted down a line every single second. The record was set by a team