Science

WASHINGTON — The Commerce Department has hired a veteran of government and industry to be the next director of the Office of Space Commerce (OSC). Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced April 27 that Richard DalBello will be the next director of the office, effective May 9. The office, located within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

We still don’t know just how the first life emerged on Earth. One suggestion is that the building blocks arrived here from space; now, a new study of several carbon-rich meteorites has added weight to this idea. Using new, extremely sensitive analysis techniques for these meteorites, a team led by scientists from Hokkaido University in

Europe’s Large Hadron Collider has started up its proton beams again at unprecedented energy levels after going through a three-year shutdown for maintenance and upgrades. It only took a couple of days of tweaking for the pilot streams of protons to reach a record energy level of 6.8 tera electronvolts, or TeV. That exceeds the

Archaeologists in the United Kingdom have uncovered a Roman-era mercenary buried with his sword and a mysterious beheaded skeleton. The Vale of Glamorgan council in Wales hired rubicon Heritage Services to assess a road they wanted to be straightened. It led to the discovery of an extensive trove of archaeological artifacts and hundreds of graves

Compared to most places you might wander in the Solar System, Titan – the giant moon of Saturn – is in many ways strangely familiar to Earth. In fact, Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with a dense atmosphere, providing a number of quasi-Earth-like weather phenomena, such as methane rainfall, which feeds

They help us put food on our tables through pollination and nutrient recycling. They break down and dispose of organic waste, and are food for many animals.  As renowned ecologist E.O. Wilson put it, “insects are the little things that run the world”. At least 87 of humanity’s major crops depend on them, but it’s

Crises such as the covid pandemic, climate change and the war in Ukraine are fueling demand for geospatial information DENVER – Elon Musk earlier this month opened a new Tesla assembly plant in Austin, Texas, and predicted it will produce as many as 500,000 vehicles annually by next year.  To keep a closer eye on

Many people know modern dogs evolved from the grey wolf. But did you know most of the more than 340 modern dog breeds we have today only emerged within the past 200 years? Dogs were first domesticated during the Neolithic period between 29,000 and 14,000 years ago, and have been closely linked to humans ever

The world’s largest particle collider is getting ready to smash atoms harder than ever before. Following a three-year break of scheduled maintenance, upgrades, and pandemic delays, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is preparing to power up for its third, and most powerful yet, experimental period. If all initial tests and checks starting this month go well, scientists

Somewhere by the banks of what is now the river Aveyron in the south of France, tens of thousands of years ago, families gathered by the light of a roaring fire to watch tiny creatures dance amid the shadow and flame. Or so we might imagine. A fresh look at more than 50 stone plaquettes

When two bodies in space are close together enough, their gravity acts as a brake, slowing them until one’s rotation ‘locks’ to match its orbit. This tidal locking means that one side of the smaller body is permanently facing the larger – it’s the reason why we only ever see one side of the Moon from

Each year on April 22 Google’s homepage marks the occasion of Earth Day. Most of the time, these interactive logos are a celebration of our planet and its ecosystems, but this year, after a particularly devastating international climate report, the Google Doodle has taken a stark turn. In 2018, the Earth Day doodle featured the

SAN FRANCISCO — Copernic Space, the latest company to bring Kevin O’Connell onto its advisory board, is unlike other ventures the former director of the U.S. Office of Space Commerce has joined. In contrast to the space situational awareness and space traffic management startups O’Connell tends to work with, Copernic Space has the lofty ambition

It’s official: after some careful data analysis, the Tonga volcano eruption of 2022 has been confirmed as the largest explosive eruption of the 21st century, and on par with the biggest eruptions ever recorded. Having ejected material around 10 cubic kilometers (more than 2 cubic miles) in volume, generating an atmospheric shock wave that circled

Scientists are hopeful that solid-state thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cells with no moving parts can achieve higher efficiencies at higher temperatures when it comes to converting heat into electricity – and lead the way to power grids based entirely on renewables. One such TPV cell has now hit a new world record of 40 percent efficiency, researchers

Many of us are familiar with imposter syndrome: feelings of doubt about our skills and intelligence, and a sense that we’re going to get exposed as frauds at any moment. It can be a debilitating mental condition, but new research has found a positive angle. It turns out that people with imposter syndrome are more

We’ve written about some truly stunning deep space pictures here on ScienceAlert, but a new Hubble snap showcasing a special collection of five galaxies has to be one of the best yet – even by our high standards. The group of galaxies is called the Hickson Compact Group 40, and they’re unusually close together at the

Clouds that form in the frosty air above Antarctica are different in the way that water and ice interact inside them, a new study reveals – and that in turn changes how much sunlight they reflect back into space, which is important for climate change models. Through a combination of modeling, satellite imagery and data

There’s never been a house call quite like this. In a first for telepresence communication, a NASA flight surgeon was ‘holoported’ to the International Space Station (ISS), appearing and conversing as a virtual presence in real time, hundreds of miles above the surface of Earth. If it sounds like Star Trek, you’re not too far

VICTORIA, British Columbia — Canada’s military will establish a new space division later this year as it further develops its capabilities and skills for space operations. Royal Canadian Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Adamson is the services’s director general for space. Credit: Royal Canadian Air Force Royal Canadian Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Adamson, the services’s

It’s confirmed: The hottest rock ever discovered in Earth’s crust really was super-hot.  The rock, a fist-sized piece of black glass, was discovered in 2011 and first reported in 2017, when scientists wrote in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters that it had been formed in temperatures reaching 4,298 degrees Fahrenheit (2,370 degrees Celsius), hotter than

One of the ways we can fully realize the potential of quantum computers is by basing them on both light and matter – this way, information can be stored and processed, but also travel at the speed of light. Scientists have just taken a step closer to this goal, by successfully producing the largest hybrid

We’ve all heard those people who say “running gives you a high” or “exercise is addictive,” but for many of us, it’s hard to love exercise. Some might even say they hate it, dread it, or the thought of going to the gym gives them anxiety. Why do some of us hate exercise? And how

A first-of-its-kind ‘missing link’ object detected in the early Universe may solve the mystery of the oldest supermassive black holes in existence, scientists say. The discovery of GNz7q, a black hole dating back to just 750 million years after the Big Bang, aligns with theoretical predictions of what an ‘ancestor’ to supermassive black holes might

Despite accounting for only a small percentage of the world’s population, rich nations have a long history of over-extracting raw materials from the planet, and a new study highlights just how excessive and harmful this pattern of plunder really is. In an analysis looking back over almost 50 years of natural resource extraction across the

Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth’s crust than anybody has dug before. Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start that

Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant and all the facilities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have been completely disconnected and are now without electricity, Ukraine’s state energy company has announced.  Russian forces attacked the defunct nuclear facility on the very first day of the invasion (Feb. 24), seizing it after heavy fighting and taking its roughly 210 staff hostage, Live Science previously

Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight –

Nearly all of us have wished to be a fly on the wall during a particularly juicy conversation, or disappear into the background after an embarrassing gaffe. It’s not surprising that invisibility cloaks are a mainstay of fantasy fiction. In recent years, there have been many attempts to devise some sort of invisibility tech. Now,

The cutting-edge number-crunching capabilities of artificial intelligence mean that AI systems are able to spot diseases early, manage chemical reactions, and explain some of the mysteries of the Universe. But there’s a downside to this incredible and virtually limitless artificial brainpower. New research emphasizes how easily AI models can be trained for malicious purposes as