Science

By disrupting the thermodynamic equilibrium of liquids, physicists have made them behave quite differently from how they do in nature – managing to coax liquids into straight-sided squares and hexagons, and patterns of lattices. This is not just fascinating for its own sake, but could help us better understand how liquids behave under different conditions

Two polished stone balls shaped about 5,500 years ago – linked to a mysterious practice almost unique to Neolithic Britain – have been discovered in an ancient tomb on the island of Sanday, in the Orkney Islands north of mainland Scotland. Hundreds of similar stone balls, each about the size of a baseball, have been

Gravitational wave interferometers such as LIGO are deeply impressive feats of engineering, honed over years to measure the barely-detectable ripples in space-time generated by massive cosmic objects. But the cosmos has given us another tool with which we might be able to detect elusive gravitational wave signals. These are a type of dead star named

Levels of molecular hydrogen (H2) in the atmosphere have surged in modern times due to human activity, according to new research. When scientists analyzed air samples trapped in drilled cores of Antarctica’s ice, they found atmospheric hydrogen had increased 70 percent over the course of the 20th century. Even as recent air pollution laws have

It is the elephant in the genomics room: can extinct species be resurrected? One bioscience firm insists they can, announcing Monday its intent to use emerging technology to restore the woolly mammoth to the Arctic tundra. New company Colossal, capitalizing on a partnership with a Harvard geneticist, said its species “de-extinction” effort has the potential

WASHINGTON — NASA confirmed Sept. 14 that one its astronauts, Mark Vande Hei, will remain on the International Space Station until next March, setting an American spaceflight duration record in the process. The agency announced that Vande Hei, along with Russian cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov, had their six-month stays on the station extended by another six

There’s nothing better than a nice exfoliation to clean your parrot self after a long day. Apparently, that holds true even if you’re a parrot with only half a beak. Biologists have discovered that Bruce – a disabled New Zealand kea (Nestor notabilis) at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch – has been using tiny

Sound waves don’t always hit our ears directly – they can also bounce off other objects and the walls of the space that we’re in, which is why listening to a band play in a cavernous cathedral is a different experience to listening in a small music club. Now scientists have developed a technique for

A 23-year-old student in Germany can shrink and enlarge his pupils on demand, according to a new case report – a feat that was previously thought to be impossible. Two tiny opposing muscles in the eye act as puppeteers of each pupil (the dark center of the eye), dilating or enlarging them in a dark environment to

Our planet Earth is a mote of dust in the cosmos, carrying its precious cargo of all the life we know exists in the Universe, sailing a sea of stars. It’s easy to forget that, even when standing under a sky studded with glittering, distant fire. But a new photograph from European Space Agency (ESA)

Leave a cheap plastic bag in the sun long enough and it’ll eventually crumble into a powdery mess, its petrochemical fragments destined to be blown far and wide by the elements. Microplastic fragments – considered a major ecological hazard all on their own – might not even be the worst thing to come out of

NASA is commonly thought of as America’s space agency, but its name also emphasizes another research area. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is also America’s civilian aerospace research organization.  In that role, it has been instrumental in developing new technologies ranging from rocket engines to aircraft control systems. Part of that role is running

WASHINGTON — NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the last in a series of geostationary weather satellites that had previously been launched by United Launch Alliance. NASA announced Sept. 10 that it awarded a contract to SpaceX for the Falcon Heavy launch of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) U spacecraft. The launch is scheduled

Something strange often happens just before a severe thunderstorm produces a tornado, high winds, or hailstones: A plume of ice and water known as an Above-Anvil Cirrus Plume (AACP) billows up above the top of the storm clouds and head downwind, acting as a sort of early warning system for extreme weather events. For the

Nuclear fusion offers the tantalizing prospect of a sustainable energy source that can never be exhausted – and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have announced what they describe as a “watershed moment” in making the technology viable. Fusion happens when two or more atomic nuclei merge together to create larger elements, releasing

On someone’s desk, one of the little gray cubes wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. To the untrained eye, they look like paperweights. “Marie Curie‘s granddaughter has one. She uses it as a doorstop,” Miriam Hiebert, a historian and materials scientist, told Insider. The weight of the 2-inch (5 cm) objects might be surprising, though – each

Ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) are something of a mystery for astronomers. They’re smaller galaxies in terms of the number of stars, but they’re still spread out over great distances, making them faint and difficult to spot. It’s not clear how they’re formed or if there’s something special about the dark matter halos that helps them form.

The vast majority of the world’s fossil fuels are effectively “unextractable” and must remain in the ground if we want even half a chance at meeting our climate goals, according to a new study. For nations like Indonesia and Australia, the world’s leading exporters in coal, that will require abandoning 95 percent of their natural

You may well have seen sci-fi movies or television shows where the protagonist asks to zoom in on an image and enhance the results – revealing a face, or a number plate, or any other key detail – and Google’s newest artificial intelligence engines, based on what’s known as diffusion models, are able to pull

Chirag Parikh said the call for nominations for the Users Advisory Group will stay open through the end of the month NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A notice could appear in the Federal Register as early as next week seeking nominations for the National Space Council’s industry advisory group, the council’s executive secretary Chirag Parikh said

It’s obvious that the information coming through our eyes is a fundamental way in which we navigate the world, but what’s less clear is exactly how this visual data is processed in the brain to stop us walking into walls and off the edges of cliffs. A new study looking at the behavior of fruit

Physicists sifting through old particle accelerator data have found evidence of a highly-elusive, never-before-seen process: a so-called triangle singularity.  First envisioned by Russian physicist Lev Landau in the 1950s, a triangle singularity refers to a rare subatomic process where particles exchange identities before flying away from each other. In this scenario, two particles – called

As our world continues to heat up dangerously, researchers are investigating the past to see how climate change affected our species in previous eras. A new study has revealed several human migrations into Arabia over the last 400,000 years. These migrations were driven by the same type shift in climate: an increase in rainfall over

Mars is bombarded with radiation. Without a protective magnetic shield and a thick atmosphere like Earth’s, radiation from space has a nearly unimpeded path to the Martian surface. Our machines can roam around on the surface and face all that radiation with impunity. But not humans. For humans, all that radiation is a deadly hazard.

Should 80 percent of the Amazon be declared a protected area by 2025? The world’s top conservation body is on Sunday poised to decide whether its 1,400 members can vote on this controversial proposal, put forward by indigenous groups. Submitted under an emergency provision to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the

Elon Musk announced a humanoid robot designed to help with those repetitive, boring tasks people hate doing. Musk suggested it could run to the grocery store for you, but presumably it would handle any number of tasks involving manual labor. Predictably, social media filled with references to a string of dystopian sci-fi movies about robots

TAMPA, Fla. — Kymeta said Sept. 7 that it successfully tested its u8 broadband terminal on OneWeb’s low-Earth-orbit constellation, achieving 200 megabits per second (Mbps) downlink speeds ahead of the network’s partial launch this year. Neville Meijers, Kymeta’s chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews that its electronically steered flat panel antenna is currently serving undisclosed customers

You wouldn’t miss one of Australia’s musk ducks if you saw it. The name comes from the musky smell the ducks waft around during the breeding season, and the males have a large, black lobe below their bill. But if the musk duck you’re hanging out with is called Ripper, the other dead giveaway is…

Poverty Point in northern Louisiana is one of the first US civilizations on record, inhabited by a community of Native Americans as early as 1700 BCE. In a new study, researchers have shown these inhabitants to be highly skilled engineers, rather than the simpler hunter-gatherers they’re often portrayed as. The massive earthen structures put up

It was only supposed to fly five times. And yet NASA’s helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, has completed 12 flights and it isn’t ready to retire. Given its stunning and unexpected success, the US space agency has extended Ingenuity’s mission indefinitely. The tiny helicopter has become the regular travel companion of the rover Perseverance, whose core