Science

Within one of the lushest places on our planet, an unobtrusive green plant grows amongst many other… green plants. Although long used by the Indigenous Machiguenga people, the plant’s strange mish-mash of characteristics had scientists mystified for 50 years. “I didn’t really think it was special, except for the fact that it had characteristics of plants

Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems. The Nobel committee said it was sending a message with its prize announcement just weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as the rate of

US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. ​The duo’s research, conducted independently of each other in the late 1990s and 2000s, is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions, including chronic pain. ​Patapoutian, an

Reassuring news for those waiting to delay the apocalypse for as long as possible: A new study suggests that our last line of defense against an asteroid hitting Earth is an effective strategy after all. That line of defence is what’s known as a late-time small-body disruption, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s

More than five billion people could have difficulty accessing water in 2050, the United Nations warned Tuesday, urging leaders to seize the initiative at the COP26 summit. Already in 2018, 3.6 billion people had inadequate access to water for at least one month per year, said a new report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

ST. LOUIS – LatConnect 60 will feed Spire Global Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel-tracking data into algorithms the Australian Earth-observation startup is developing with Curtin University to prevent maritime collisions, the companies announced Oct. 5. With funding from the Australian Research Council, LatConnect 60 and Curtin University’s Intelligent Sensing & Perception Laboratory are creating sensor-fusion

Not all ants are hard workers. Some in the colony slave away only so others can avoid pulling their weight. These freeloading hangers-on are known as social parasites, and they’ve essentially forged an evolutionary shortcut through the comforts of cooperative communities. Instead of building a communal network themselves, social parasites merely exploit ones that already

Many of us come away from conversations with strangers feeling that the interaction has been awkward and unwanted on both sides. But what if we’re wrong? A new study suggests that wanting to chat in depth with new people is actually a common feeling. In other words, the next time you’re talking to someone you

For all our current proficiency at studying the cosmos, there are some basic things that are still extremely difficult to do. One of those things is gauge distances, especially for random, transient flashes of light. And now one of those transient flashes, interpreted as a possible burst of gamma radiation from 13.4 billion light-years across

The polar jet stream circles the northern hemisphere, swirling up to nine miles above our heads like a curvy, ethereal crown on the planet. This band of strong wind separates cold air from the Arctic from warmer air to the south, and it’s responsible for transporting weather from west to east across the US, over

Reservoir computing is already one of the most advanced and most powerful types of artificial intelligence that scientists have at their disposal – and now a new study outlines how to make it up to a million times faster on certain tasks. That’s an exciting development when it comes to tackling the most complex computational

WASHINGTON — NASA’s administrator says he remains confident that Congress will provide the agency with funding to allow it to select a second lunar lander developer despite a lack of public progress on funding and concerns raised elsewhere in the agency about the effect an ongoing protest could have on congressional support for the program.

As the climate crisis threatens millions of species worldwide, biodiversity conservation is now an all-hands-on-deck operation. Natural history collections play a critical role in this effort as repositories holding records of historical biodiversity shifts, like libraries made of biological specimens. In response to the extinction crisis, the call is out to scour Australia’s collections for

In this day and age, it’s harder than ever before to disconnect from work. Once a person has signed off for the day, they might feel pressured to reply to an after-hours email that pops up on their phone, even if it’s not urgent. A new psychology study by researchers from the London Business School in

One advantage to planetary science is that insights from one planet could explain phenomena on another. We understand Venus‘ greenhouse gas effect from our own experience on the Earth, and Jupiter and Saturn share some characteristics. But Jupiter also provides insight into other, farther out systems, such as Uranus and Neptune. Now, a discovery from

Can we toilet train cattle? Would we want to? The answer to both of these questions is yes - and doing so could help us address issues of water contamination and climate change. Cattle urine is high in nitrogen, and this contributes to a range of environmental problems. When cows are kept mainly outdoors, as they

When it comes to the weather report, it’s not just tomorrow’s weather that meteorologists try to discern. As well as long-term forecasts, weather models are often tasked with predicting meteorological conditions over the next hour or so, known as ‘nowcasting’. Over at Google-backed artificial intelligence company DeepMind, researchers have now made a major step forward

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration says it is reviewing allegations about safety issues at Blue Origin raised in an explosive essay by a group of current and former employees. In an essay published on the website Lioness Sept. 30, the group of 21 current and former employees, most of whom are anonymous, claimed than

Kilauea volcano is erupting, sending lava and thread-like pieces of volcanic glass, known as Pele’s hair, into Hawaii’s skies, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Weather Service. The eruption began at about 3:20 pm local Hawaii time Wednesday (Sept. 29), when the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory detected a glow from its

In metals, electrons are normally expected to be diffusive in their movement, operating as individual particles – in other words, they don’t gain momentum as a group. In a new study, scientists have now discovered a type of metal where electrons actually do flow in a fluid-like way – like water in a pipe –

Modern-day imaging technology is able to uncover ancient buildings and structures not visible on the surface, and we just got another excellent example: the discovery of a hidden neighborhood in one of the biggest historical Maya cities. The city in question is Tikal, now in Guatemala. Thought to have been one of the most dominant

It may be dry as desert bones these days, but Mars was once so wet that entire landscapes were shaped by running water. Wild floods thundered across the red ground, gouging chasms in the Martian surface and dumping vast quantities of sediment that changed the shape of the landscape. And, in contrast to such landscape-changing

Younger generations are going to grow up in a very different world to that of their parents – and through no fault of their own. Compared to babies born in 1960, a series of new models suggests children born after 2010 will experience four times as many extreme climate events in their lifetimes on average,

Our planet and everything that lives on it is buckling under the weight of all the plastic waste we’re producing. The volume of these non-biodegradable materials discarded after use is only increasing, so we need new ways to tackle them, and fast. A new study demonstrates the proof-of-concept of an entirely new approach to plastic recycling, inspired

Dan Hastings: ‘I can’t tell you how many students think that flying a helicopter on Mars is just a cool thing to do’ BOSTON — MIT’s Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics graduate admissions program this past year saw a record number of applicants, “most of whom want to work in the space business,” said Daniel

On the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, nature makes art. There, on the frozen lake, stones can be found balancing atop narrow pedestals of ice in shallow cavities, as though carefully sculpted and placed. These are called ‘Zen stones’, and scientists have finally figured out how these formations occur – by reproducing the

Given that our first direct detections confirming the existence of black holes only took place in this century, humanity can be forgiven for not knowing a few things about these mysterious cosmic objects. We don’t even know everything we don’t know – a fact that’s been made evident in a new discovery. While running equations for quantum

DNA evidence has finally ended the debate about where the ancient Etruscans – an ancient civilization whose remains are found in Italy – came from. According to almost 2,000 years worth of genomic data, collected from 12 sites across Italy, these enigmatic people did not emigrate from Anatolia (a region that’s now part of Turkey), but

If you live at a high latitude, it’s time to break out the camera. Space weather agencies are predicting a solar storm for Monday 27 September: moderate, with a chance of aurora. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Met Office have both issued predictions for the storm, which is predicted

There are many reports based on scientific research that talk about the long-term impacts of climate change – such as rising levels of greenhouse gases, temperatures and sea levels – by the year 2100. The Paris Agreement, for example, requires us to limit warming to under 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end