Science

A $550 million congressional add-on in 2022 is only a down payment to kickstart the deployment of a 28-satellite constellation in low Earth orbit WASHINGTON — A $550 million increase to the Pentagon’s 2022 budget was directed by Congress to procure sensor satellites and launch them to low Earth orbit to detect and track Russian

If you’ve ever lived with a cat, you’ve probably received a painful chomp from your beloved furball’s pointy canines at least once. But 42 million years ago, your kitty’s teeth would have looked very different: Evolution was only just honing the teeth of cat-like animals to a deadly sharp tip for piercing and shredding flesh.

In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein hoped to unite his description of gravity with existing models of electromagnetism under a single master theory. It’s a quest that continues to vex theoretical physicists to this day. Two of our best models of reality – Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the laws of

We stick calendars on the wall or load them up on our phones, but the people of the third millennium BCE used giant rocks, new research suggests. A new study explains how Stonehenge may have originally been used to keep track of a solar year (aka tropical year) of 365 and a quarter days, which

Scientists discovered remnants of an Old Stone Age culture, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Beijing, where ancient hominins used a reddish pigment called ochre and crafted tiny, blade-like tools from stone. The archaeological site, called Xiamabei, offers a rare glimpse into the life of Homo sapiens and now-extinct human relatives who inhabited the region some 40,000

Researchers in Japan are investigating the origins of a nightmarish, 300-year-old mummified ’mermaid‘, which has been worshipped for centuries due to its supposed medicinal properties. The haunting remains are most likely a gruesome amalgam of a monkey’s torso sewed onto a fish’s tail, potentially embellished with hair and nails from a human.  Hiroshi Kinoshita, board member of

Across the world, girls are more likely than boys to blame academic failure on a lack of talent, according to a large study on gender stereotypes published Wednesday.  Paradoxically, the idea that males are inherently more brilliant was most entrenched in countries that are more egalitarian.  Such stereotypes have been explored in the past, but

The Achilles tendon – the largest tendon in the human body – acts like a rubber band connecting the calf muscle to the heel bone. While we know it works like a spring that stores and releases energy as we move our legs, what’s not clear is precisely how it responds to exercise and training,

Prehistoric sites are full of stone tools that appear to have two life cycles: They’ve been crafted, used, and discarded before being picked up a second time and used again. A new study puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why this is. The research suggests that the recycling of these tools is about them

An epic outburst from a baby star still in the process of forming has been captured in a spectacular Hubble image. Roughly 1,250 light-years away, in the Orion molecular cloud star-forming region, jets from a protostar are punching through the cloud at supersonic speeds, heating the gas and causing it to glow brightly. The result

A global analysis of sea levels over the past 2,000 years has found a rapid rate of increase in line with the Industrial Revolution. By 1863, researchers found the rate of sea level rise had clearly surpassed background variability. Unsurprisingly, it’s around this time that the first hints of ocean warming and glacier melt from

The catastrophic disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 was caused by an explosion at the Reactor 4 Unit. This expelled a sizeable quantity of radioactive material into the surroundings, alongside a partial meltdown of the reactor core. The last few decades have seen substantial international efforts to safely contain and decontaminate the

SAN FRANCISCO – Acme AtronOmatic, vendor of the MyRadar weather app, won FCC approval to launch satellites to demonstrate technology for a constellation that ultimately could include 250 satellites or more. The satellites, scheduled to launch in April on a Rocket Lab Electron from New Zealand, are designed to test and validate hardware for Orlando,

An enormous impact crater, hiding deep beneath Greenland’s Hiawatha glacier, is probably the result of a kilometer-wide asteroid that crashed into Earth 58 million years ago. That’s much older than scientists presumed – roughly eight million years after the infamous impact that killed off most dinosaurs. When the Hiawatha crater was first discovered in 2015,

What happens to information after it has passed beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There have been suggestions that the geometry of wormholes might help us solve this vexing problem – but the math has been tricky, to say the least. In a new paper, an international team of physicists has found a

Explorers have found one of the most famous shipwrecks in history, Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, deep in the icy sea off Antarctica more than a century after it sank, they announced Wednesday. Endurance was discovered at a depth of 3,008 meters (9,869 feet) in the Weddell Sea, about six kilometers (four miles) from where it was

The largest molecule yet found in a roiling disk of dust and gas around a baby star has been identified, scientists report. In this swirling cloud, astronomers detected the signature of dimethyl ether, a molecule that contains nine atoms. This oxygen-bearing molecule can act as a building block for sugars and other biomolecules, which means

Every summer, as the sea ice surrounding Antarctica retreats, tens of thousands of tourists and scientists flock to the landmass by boat and plane. The remote continent is becoming increasingly accessible – during the 2019-20 season, the number of sightseeing visitors reached 74,000, with the vast majority traveling by ship. Scientific activities on the continent

Hammered by climate change and relentless deforestation, the Amazon rainforest is losing its capacity to recover and could irretrievably transition into savannah, with dire consequences for the region and the world, according to a study published Monday. Researchers warned that the results mean the Amazon could be approaching a so-called “tipping point” faster than previously

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6 percent in 2021 to a record 36.3 billion metric tons, their highest ever level, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday. “The increase in global CO2 emissions of over 2 billion metric tons was the largest in history in absolute terms, more than offsetting the previous year’s pandemic-induced

When you’re older, your home town will feel different. That’s true for everybody. But for people living today, the changes will be impossible to ignore. We usually measure climate change in terms of rising temperatures. But scientists say there’s another way of thinking about it: spatial displacement. In a study from 2019, researchers found that

Researchers have discovered two types of human brain cells that physically help us form memories. These cells play a significant role in dividing continuous conscious experience into distinct segments that can be recalled in the future.  As we move from the past, through the present, and into the future, we form autobiographical memories – reference

Two sets of giant bubbles that extend thousands of light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way could have been produced by the same event, in spite of their significant difference in size. They’re called the Fermi bubbles and the eROSITA bubbles, and astronomers believe they were the result of activity by the

The United Nations on Wednesday agreed to start negotiating a world-first global treaty on plastic pollution in what has been hailed a watershed moment for the planet. Nearly 200 nations at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi unanimously agreed to create an intergovernmental committee to negotiate and finalize a legally binding plastics treaty by 2024.

What it will take to make DoD constellations more resilient and achieve space superiority is still being debated, industry executives said. ORLANDO, Fla. — An often-heard complaint about U.S. military satellites is that they’re not resilient — which generally means they don’t have enough protections against modern electronic jammers, advanced lasers and cyber hacks.  This

California is a land divided by a 1,287-kilometer-long (800 miles) rupture known as the San Andreas Fault. Running north to south through the state close to several major cities, it has been responsible for some of the US’s most devastating earthquakes. There are regions in the state’s heart that haven’t experienced the fault’s full fury,

We’ve just taken another step closer to time crystals that can be used for practical applications. New experimental work has yielded a room-temperature time crystal in a system that is not isolated from its ambient surroundings. This, the researchers say, paves the way for chip-scale time crystals that can be used in real-world settings, away

Archaeologists may have just uncovered evidence for the oldest known practice of mummification. Human remains interred 8,000 years ago in the Sado Valley in Portugal, during the Mesolithic, appear to have been deliberately treated for mummification prior to burial. This is the first evidence for Mesolithic mummification in Europe. It’s also possibly the oldest in

On March 4, 2022, a lonely, spent rocket booster will smack into the surface of the Moon at nearly 6,000 mph. Once the dust has settled, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will move into position to get an up-close view of the smoldering crater and hopefully shed some light on the mysterious physics of planetary impacts.

Insects have been touted as a food of the future, not least because of the sustainability benefits. An excellent protein source, they take up significantly fewer resources to produce when compared to traditional farming. Give your farm of mealworms around 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of food and you’ll get a kilogram of edible protein; with beef,