Science

September offers a number of fascinating lunar occultation events worldwide. Chances are, there’s one near you this month. The Moon is certainly busy in September, as its passage covers up (occults) multiple celestial objects worldwide. If skies are clear, you may just get a chance to see one of these events listed below, as the

Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells. But given a chance, what might this web of impulses do if granted a moment of freedom? An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Cornell University in the US and

SAN FRANCISCO – Collimate Space, a new Silicon Valley startup, aims to tackle a specific problem for satellite operators. Collimate offers a tool for predicting the success of satellite downlinks, after considering space weather, terrestrial weather and the location and profile of ground-based antennas. That’s valuable because satellite operators can say to a customer, ‘I

We all have a wondrous ability to form emotional attachments to many different things, from nature and pets to romantic partners and our children. Researchers have now used brain scans to reveal how each of these different types of ‘love’ have a distinct home in our minds. Unsurprisingly, the love a parent has for their

The idea that aliens may have visited the Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of UK citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7 percent believe that they have seen a UFO. The figures are even higher in the US – and rising. The number of people who believe

WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency is adjusting the trajectory of its BepiColombo mission to Mercury, delaying its insertion into orbit around the innermost planet by nearly a year to compensate for reduced performance from its electric thrusters. ESA announced Sept. 2 that the spacecraft, a joint mission with the Japanese space agency JAXA that

The genes of modern Japanese people may have been hiding a long-lost line of ancestors, who once migrated to the top of the archipelago from the northeastern mainland of Asia. The discovery supports emerging evidence, which suggests that modern Japanese people are descended from not two but three ancestral lineages. Until recently, the dominating hypothesis

Look hard enough at the roiling mist of gas and starlight that is our galaxy, and you’ll find traces of a violent upbringing. Yet the scars of our past aren’t always easy to distinguish from more mundane tides that advance cosmic evolution, leaving researchers to speculate which patterns are evidence of cataclysmic events and which

WASHINGTON — General Dynamics Mission Systems, a unit of defense contractor General Dynamics, has been awarded a $491 million contract extension by the Space Development Agency for satellite ground systems, the Pentagon announced Aug. 30. The modification nearly doubles the company’s existing contract with the Space Development Agency (SDA) to approximately $900 million through 2029.

In an old Italian crypt from the 17th century, two mummified brains have been found containing traces of cocaine. This is almost two entire centuries before the coca plant’s psychoactive compounds were isolated to produce pure cocaine – one of the most addictive substances known to humans. The burial chamber where the mummified remains were

Just outside the Milky Way Galaxy, roughly 210,000 light-years from Earth, there is the dwarf galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Measuring about 18,900 light-years in diameter and containing roughly 3 billion stars, the SMC and its counterpart – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – orbit the Milky Way as satellite galaxies. Scientists

WASHINGTON — SpaceX resumed launches of its Falcon 9 rocket early Aug. 31 after the Federal Aviation Administration ended a brief grounding of the vehicle. One Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 3:43 a.m. Eastern, placing 21 Starlink satellites into orbit. It was followed at 4:48

Countries where English is the official language have a lot in common due to their shared British colonial history – but a new study has found that life expectancy varies greatly between Anglophonic nations. What’s more, one nation in particular – Australia – appears to stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of

Warp drives have a long history of not existing, despite their ubiquitous presence in science fiction. Writer John Campbell first introduced the idea in a science fiction novel called Islands of Space. These days, thanks to Star Trek in particular, the term is very familiar. It’s almost a generic reference for superliminal travel through hyperspace.

We’ve long thought all great white sharks belonged to a single, global species of long-distance swimmers. Advances in computing and gene sequencing by an international team of researchers have now revealed groups in the north Pacific, southern Pacific and Indian Ocean, and north Atlantic and Mediterranean are surprisingly distinct. Separated from each other up to

WASHINGTON — A veteran NASA astronaut and rookie Russian cosmonaut will fly to the International Space Station in September as the downsized crew of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, a ripple effect of problems with Boeing’s Starliner. NASA announced Aug. 30 that Nick Hague will serve as commander of Crew-9, joined by mission specialist Aleksandr

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. During a visit to the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa in Israel, a young boy’s father was shocked to see his son next to a shattered Bronze Age jar. The boy’s father told the BBC that he first thought, “It wasn’t my child that did it,” but then

An invisible, weak energy field wrapped around our planet Earth has finally been detected and measured. It’s called the ambipolar field, an electric field first hypothesized more than 60 years ago, and its discovery will change the way we study and understand the behavior and evolution of our beautiful, ever-changing world. “Any planet with an

For nearly 60 million years, our home planet was likely frozen into a big snowball. Now, scientists have discovered evidence of Earth’s transition from a tropical underwater world, writhing with photosynthetic bacteria, to a frozen wasteland – all preserved within the layers of giant rocks in a chain of Scottish and Irish islands. The team,

Scientists have created a ‘living plastic’ that self-destructs when the material begins to erode. In the composting process, the novel product breaks down within a month, compared with more traditional versions that take up to 55 days to decompose under the same conditions. The hopeful technology was inspired by the power of plastic-munching proteins, which

WASHINGTON — Falcon 9 launches are temporarily on hold as the Federal Aviation Administration looks into any public safety implications of the failed landing of a booster early Aug. 28. In an Aug. 28 statement, the FAA stated it was aware of the incident earlier that day when a Falcon 9 booster landed on a

Connecting our dream worlds to our conscious realities might be entirely possible, according to emerging research. A new study by three researchers from the US neurotechnology company, REMspace, has shown with a bit of training, some of us might be able to react and respond to devices around us while we are ‘lucidly’ dreaming. Lucid

We think of planets as the inherently confined children of host stars. Space, however, is a strange and mercurial thing; objects do not always follow the rules we think they ought. Using JWST, astronomers have caught six ‘rogue’, planet-sized objects, zooming untethered to any star, wild and free through interstellar space, in the gorgeous environment

Right now, human population growth is doing something long thought impossible – it’s wavering. It’s now possible global population could peak much earlier than expected, topping 10 billion in the 2060s. Then, it would begin to fall. In wealthier countries, it’s already happening. Japan’s population is falling sharply, with a net loss of 100 people

While the idea of a quantum internet has a huge amount of potential, getting it hooked up to the regular old internet has its challenges. Now a new study hints at how existing and future networks could be combined. An experiment conducted by researchers from Leibniz University Hannover in Germany show how quantum information and

WASHINGTON — ABL Space Systems said it lost its second RS1 rocket after a static-fire test when a fire broke out under the vehicle fed by leaking fuel that could not be extinguished by pad systems. The company released Aug. 26 details about the July 19 incident that led to the loss of the vehicle

A ruined building in Kafr El Sheikh was where ancient Egyptians once stood, gazing at the stars above. More than 2,500 years ago, the building constituted the largest astronomical observatory known in Egypt in the 6th century BCE, part of what we now call the Temple of the Pharaohs in the town of Buto. There,

Two US astronauts who arrived at the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s Starliner will have to stay six more months and return home with rival SpaceX, NASA said Saturday, in a fresh public relations blow to the crisis-hit aviation giant. The return of Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams had already been delayed for

It’s winter in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, the weather is unusually warm. The top temperatures over large parts of the country this weekend were well above average for this time of year. The outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia recorded 38.5°C on Friday and 39.4°C on Saturday – about 16°C above average.

WASHINGTON — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner will return from the International Space Station in September without the two astronauts on board who launched on it in June after NASA concluded thruster problems posed too much risk. NASA announced Aug. 24 that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the NASA astronauts who flew to the ISS on Starliner’s