We can’t understand nature without understanding its range. That’s apparent in exoplanet science and in our theories of planetary formation. Nature’s outliers and oddballs put pressure on our models and motivate scientists to dig deeper. Gliese 367 b (or Tahay) is certainly an oddball. It’s an Ultrashort Period (USP) planet that orbits its star in
For centuries, inventor, scholar, and artist Leonardo da Vinci has been lauded for his precise, well-proportioned drawings and imaginative designs. He grasped gravity’s similarity to acceleration a century before Newton, and his artworks were sheer genius in their perspective and geometry. But on closer inspection, it seems one of the rules da Vinci devised to
Virtually every animal on Earth can thank their mother for the energy that fuels each of their cells. The power is generated in a part of the cell known as the mitochondria, and this organelle is made entirely from a genetic recipe laid out in your mother’s DNA. A father’s mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, plays
We may have to rethink our plans for tapping into reserves of water on the Moon. According to a new analysis of lunar craters, these pocks and divots that mar and characterize the lunar surface are too young for the long-term retention of ancient reservoirs of water ice. In fact, most of the craters that
Generative AI – which encompasses large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT but also image and video generators like DALL·E 2 – supercharges what has come to be known as “digital necromancy“, the conjuring of the dead from the digital traces they leave behind. Debates around digital necromancy were first sparked in the 2010s by advances
Neolithic humans were apparently big on reuse. According to an analysis of bones from Cueva de los Marmoles, or Marmoles Cave in Southern Spain, it wasn’t necessarily uncommon for living humans to repurpose the deceased, and recycle their bones into tools. Amongst a collection of bones dating back thousands of years ago, archaeologists led by
A flawless new image from NASA using a clever mix of photographs from two different cameras has captured a crater on the Moon that has not seen the light of day for billions of years. The ancient pockmark, known as Shackleton Crater, is located in a mountainous part of the lunar south pole, where, due
Engineers working with the European Space Agency have developed a new thruster design smaller than the tip of your finger. Despite its small size, this mini-thruster designed for CubeSats appears to be highly efficient without the use of toxic chemicals. Called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster), it allows CubeSats to maneuver without
It takes a few things to make a diamond. First, you need carbon. Then you need a bunch of pressure and heat deep below the crust. And time – up to billions of years of it – for nature to do its job and then cough them up somewhere close to the planet’s surface. That’s
When the ancient supercontinent Gondwana was torn asunder 83 million years ago, a huge chunk of it sank beneath the waves as it drifted away. According to some geologists, this submerged chunk – called Zealandia – would be considered Earth’s 8th continent, it weren’t for a thick layer of ocean water obscuring our view. Instead,
Over 70 million years ago, dinosaurs lumbered through a wintry landscape in what is now Alaska. At the time, the Prince Creek Formation (PCF) was above the Arctic Circle and would’ve had constant darkness for four straight months. The below-freezing temperatures and occasional snowfall were inhospitable to many, but it seemed to suit a tiny
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew right through a massive solar eruption and caught the whole thing on camera. It’s the first up-close footage ever captured of a solar explosion like this. The video, released by scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, features an especially powerful coronal mass ejection that took place last year. CMEs
Magnificent as they are, most fossils are rather monochromatic, prompting paleontologists to go to great lengths to infer what color those ancient organisms might have been. Some exceptional fossils have preserved the pigment molecules in dinosaur feathers and scaly skin. But given the millions of years that separate us from the lives of those ancient
The building blocks of our brain cells may have begun to form back when our ancestors were still a blobby collection of animal cells oozing through the ocean’s shallows. Researchers from Spain and Germany have discovered characteristics of specialized secretory cells in simple animals called placozoans which could identify them as a prelude to neurons
A shadowy form of light within a universe of hypothetical particles is getting some serious consideration as a means of discovering the identity of dark matter. According to a comprehensive new analysis under quantum chromodynamics, the dark photon is a much better fit for the observed results of particle collider experiments than the standard model
A new measurement of the Universe has confirmed dark energy makes up close to 69 percent of the sum of everything. That leaves the remaining 31 percent to matter; both of the normal variety – that’s the particles and forces making up everything we can see – and dark matter, the mysterious gravitational poltergeist responsible
On Earth, continents are likely necessary to support life. Continents ‘float’ on top of the Earth’s viscous mantle, and heat from the planet’s core keeps the mantle from solidifying and locking the continents into place. The core is hot because of the presence of radioactive elements that came from neutron star collisions. It should be
From the oxygen-carrying corpuscles in our blood to the branching neurons that govern our thoughts, our body is built of a dazzling variety of cells. Researchers from institutions in Germany, Canada, Spain, and the US have published a comprehensive study of how many individual cells of each type there are in typical bodies. Based on
Marine heatwaves may last longer and be more intense in deeper water, potentially threatening sensitive species as climate change makes the extreme events more frequent, researchers said on Monday. Oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat produced by the carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age. Marine heatwaves
Quantum behavior is a strange, fragile thing that hovers on the edge of reality, between a world of possibility and a Universe of absolutes. In that mathematical haze lies the potential of quantum computing; the promise of devices that could quickly solve algorithms that would take classic computers too long to process. For now, quantum
One of the most mysterious stars in the Milky Way might soon have an explanation for its odd behavior. It’s called Boyajian’s Star, or KIC 8462852 – less formally known as Tabby’s Star, a yellow-white glimmer some 1,470 light-years away – and its strange short-term brightness fluctuations and longer-term changes have so far defied scientists’
Like the comet striking the dinosaurs – in slower motion, but just as deadly – human activity is hacking off entire branches from the tree of life, a new study confirms. “It is changing the trajectory of evolution globally and destroying the conditions that make human life possible,” ecologists warn in their new paper. “It
A huge invisible mass could be the reason the Milky Way’s disk is warped and twisted. A new study shows that a tilted, misaligned dark halo – the large blob of dark matter that wraps around and permeates our home galaxy – is the only explanation to date that explains all the features of the
We know there’s ice on the Moon – what’s less clear is where it came from. A new study suggests that waves of electrons, arriving indirectly from Earth and the Sun, are contributing to the formation of frozen water on the lunar surface. These electrons hit the Moon as it passes in and out of
Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving you with an spooky sense of pastness. But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system. Our research
Every once in a while, a high reading of radioactivity off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, sends the US government scrambling to look for a nuclear weapon that’s likely hidden 13 to 55 feet below the ocean and sand, buried in the seafloor. On February 5, 1958, two Air Force jets collided in mid-air
Dinosaurs have a reputation for being the most terrifying prehistoric predators, but a newly discovered skull sheds light on a fearsome beast that dominated 40 million years before the first ‘terrible lizards’ walked the Earth. The 265-million-year-old fossil found in Brazil reveals the largest meat eater of its time, one that prowled the jungles searching
The traditional porcelain and ceramic toilet bowls could be on the way out, if a new 3D-printed design from scientists at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China catches on – with the key benefit being the ultra slippery surface. Poop that clings to the toilet bowl is not only unpleasant for bathroom
Imagine living in a cool, green city flush with parks and threaded with footpaths, bike lanes, and buses, which ferry people to shops, schools, and service centers in a matter of minutes. That breezy dream is the epitome of urban planning, encapsulated in the idea of the 15-minute city, where all basic needs and services
Seen through a giant’s eyes, our Universe’s galaxies cling like foam to the surface of an eternal ocean, drawing into clumps and strings around inky voids. This sparkling web has taken eons to come together, congealing gradually under gravity’s guidance out of what was, billions of years ago, an evenly-spread fog of white-hot particles fresh
If you looked up 66 million years ago you might have seen, for a split second, a bright light as a mountain-sized asteroid burned through the atmosphere and smashed into Earth. It was springtime and the literal end of an era, the Mesozoic. If you somehow survived the initial impact, you would have witnessed the
Neutrinos, the tricky little particles that just stream through the Universe like it’s virtually nothing, may actually interact with light after all. According to new calculations, interactions between neutrinos and photons can take place in powerful magnetic fields that can be found in the plasma wrapped around stars. It’s a discovery that could help us
An experiment that took place on Mars has shown that it’s feasible to extract breathable oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere. From its little home in the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover, the briefcase-sized Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment (MOXIE) has been repeatedly breaking apart molecules in Mars air to generate a small,
The curvature of space-time around a colossal mass has yielded the most detailed measurement of the cosmic distribution of dark matter yet. Aided by a gravitational lens, a team led by cosmologist Kaiki Taro Inoue of Kindai University in Japan has mapped the mysterious form of matter on the smallest scale we’ve ever seen, with
For the past 24,000 years or so, a hidden sanctuary of Paleolithic rock art has endured on the walls of a cave near Valencia in eastern Spain, holding clues about the ancient artists and the world they inhabited. The cave itself is well-known to locals and spelunkers yet more than 110 paintings and engravings went
For eons, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) has served as a sort of instruction manual for life, providing not just templates for a vast array of chemical structures but a means of managing their production. In recent years engineers have explored a subtly new role for the molecule’s unique capabilities, as the basis for a biological computer.
A close look at a mix of old and newly discovered fossils indicates that an ancient species of photosynthesizing bacterium was among the first of its kind to make its home on dry land more than 400 million years ago. Characteristics of a microbe named Langiella scourfieldii place it into a category of cyanobacteria that
Former political leaders and heads of international organisations called Thursday for national moratoriums on deploying technologies to slow global warming by dimming the impact of the Sun. The Climate Overshoot Commission said research and experiments into so-called solar radiation modification (SRM) should move forward, but only under international supervision and in jurisdictions with strong environmental
In response to a new report from an independent panel, NASA says it has appointed a director in charge of research into UFOs — now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and will work with other agencies to widen the net for collecting UAP data. “This is the first time that NASA has
Human activity and appetites have weakened Earth’s resilience, pushing it far beyond the “safe operating space” that keeps the world liveable for most species, including our own, a landmark study said Wednesday. Six of nine planetary boundaries – climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals including plastics, freshwater depletion, and nitrogen use – are already
When Isaac Newton inscribed onto parchment his now-famed laws of motion in 1687, he could have only hoped we’d be discussing them three centuries later. Writing in Latin, Newton outlined three universal principles describing how the motion of objects is governed in our Universe, which have been translated, transcribed, discussed and debated at length. But
The astronaut Frank Rubio broke the record for the longest in orbit mission by an American, spending more than 355 days aboard the International Space Station. “In some ways, it’s been an incredible challenge. But in other ways, it’s been an incredible blessing,” Rubio said Wednesday from the ISS during a chat with NASA that
Something rather monstrous happens to the nematode Allodiplogaster sudhausi when reduced to snacking on boring old fungus. Scientists have discovered it develops a giant mouth and feasts on other worms, including those from its own family. This new form has been named the teratostomatous morph, with “teras” being an ancient Greek word for monster. Two
Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles that have a crucial role in the composition of the Universe. Initially considered massless, these barely-detectable particles ought to weigh something according to updated theories. Exactly what that measurement is has yet to be determined experimentally. An international team of scientists has come up with a new way to solving
They lounge in hot tubs, have active sex lives, and sometimes, take joyrides. Macaques are living the life. Photographer Atsuyuki Ohshima captured a rare photo of one monkey’s cowboy behavior. The photo, taken on Japan’s Yakushima Island, is titled “Forest Rodeo.” Ohshima snapped the photo just after the monkey catapulted itself onto a sika deer,
The James Webb Space Telescope has measured the expansion rate of the Universe, and the results are not great news for the biggest crisis in cosmology. The finding is in agreement with measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope. This means that there’s no error in the Hubble data, and we’re still at an impasse.
Now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), ‘UFOs’ have certainly long captivated our curiosity. NASA commissioned a study team in 2022 to investigate such hard-to-easily-classify reports, and tomorrow they’re revealing the highly anticipated findings at a media briefing. The scarcity of high-quality observations of UAPs – defined as objects in the sky that are
For nearly fifty years, mathematicians have puzzled over a deceptively simple question: how small can you make a Möbius strip without it intersecting itself? Now, Richard Schwartz, a mathematician at Brown University, has proposed an elegant solution to this problem, which was originally posed by mathematicians Charles Weaver and Benjamin Halpern in 1977. In their
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