The world’s largest iceberg might crash into an island populated by penguins and seals, which could cause mass starvation among the animals’ young. The iceberg, dubbed A68a, broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf in 2017. It has been drifting north ever since, and now it’s dangerously close to South Georgia Island. The area is
Month: December 2020
Nothing keeps time like the beating heart of an atom. But even the crisp tick-tock of a vibrating nucleus is limited by uncertainties imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Several years ago, researchers from MIT and the University of Belgrade in Serbia proposed that quantum entanglement could push clocks beyond this blurry boundary. Now,
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundations Tuesday for what he said would be the world’s largest renewable energy park, set to produce a massive 30 gigawatts of electricity. The vast project in the Kutch region of western Gujarat state spread over an area of 72,600 hectares (180,000 acres) – the size of Singapore
Methane leaks from the environment and human activity are a serious greenhouse gas problem. Methane is many times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat, and scientists now say the Moon plays a key role in how much of the gas gets released. It’s all down to the tides and the tugging effect that
One of the central technologies of artificial intelligence is neural networks. In this interview, Tam Nguyen, a professor of computer science at the University of Dayton, explains how neural networks, programs in which a series of algorithms try to simulate the human brain, work. What are some examples of neural networks that are familiar to
If the coral refuge of the Red Sea can survive local pollution, scientists think these reefs might be the last ones standing on a rapidly warming planet. But that’s a big ‘if’. Right now, life in this region is moored to the fate of a 45-year-old tanker, gradually rusting away off the western coast of
A team of cryptography enthusiasts announced Friday they had successfully cracked one of the coded messages sent over 50 years ago by the “Zodiac Killer,” who terrorized northern California in the late 1960s and remains unidentified. The message was sent in November 1969 to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper by the alleged serial killer, its
A soft snow fell as a clutch of visitors equipped with a Geiger counter wandered through the ghostly Ukrainian town of Pripyat, frozen in time since the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986. More than three decades after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster forced thousands to evacuate, there is an influx of visitors to the area
Mexican archaeologists said Friday they had found remains of 119 more people, including women and several children, in a centuries-old Aztec “tower of skulls” in the heart of the capital. The new discovery was announced after an eastern section of the Huei Tzompantli was uncovered along with the outer facade, five years after the northeastern
For a quarter of a century, the ESA-NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been essential in helping scientists understand the heart of our Solar System, the Sun. The SOHO mission launched 25 years ago this week, and to celebrate, ESA compiled a wonderful mosaic of images, and NASA put together a remarkable SOHO “greatest
Imagine being a potato farmer in Ethiopia, Kenya, or Nigeria. On a small piece of land, which you depend on for food and income, you have spent months planting, weeding, and watering. Up to twice a week, you manually spray your field, sometimes with limited equipment, or hire someone to do it, spending much of
If we’re going to get better at powering the planet with renewable energy, we need to get better at finding ways of efficiently storing that energy until it’s needed – and scientists have identified a particular material that could give us exactly that. The material is known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), in which carbon-based
Earth is still on course to warm more than 3 degrees Celsius by the century’s end despite a dip in greenhouse gas emissions caused by the pandemic and pledges to curb pollution, the UN said on Wednesday. In its annual assessment of emissions levels, the UN’s Environment Programme found that 2020’s 7-percent fall in carbon
Scientists may have discovered a large-toothed mammal off the western coast of Mexico that they say looks and sounds unlike anything else on Earth. Researchers collected environmental genetic samples of this strange creature that are still being analysed, but the photographs and acoustic recordings have researchers “highly confident” it’s a never-before-described species of beaked whale.
When European settlers began arriving to eastern North America in the 16th century, they were met by staggering numbers of seabirds. One of the world’s most abundant is the Leach’s storm petrel, which forages at sea during the day. At night, after the birds had returned to the breeding colony en masse, the settlers would
The palm oil industry is not good for the planet. Making room for these crops has inevitably led to deforestation, peatland draining, widespread burning, biodiversity losses, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. But what greener options do we have? With little research on the environmental impacts of alternative crops, some researchers think we could be
Global emissions are expected to decline by about 7 percent in 2020 (or 2.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide) compared to 2019 – an unprecedented drop due to the slowdown in economic activity associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. To put this into perspective, the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 saw a 1.5 percent drop in
“I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice. “But a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!” It’s an experience eminent physicist Yakir Aharonov can relate to. Together with fellow Israeli physicist Daniel Rohrlich, he’s shown theoretically how a particle might show its face
Matter is what makes up the Universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it – especially for the physicists. Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and I have described an updated way to think about matter. We propose that matter is not
Improving the efficiency of solar cells can make a huge difference to the amount of energy produced from the same surface area and the same amount of sunshine, and another world record has been beaten in the push for better yields. Researchers have now hit an efficiency of 29.15 percent in the perovskite/silicon tandem solar
Blue Moon. Strawberry Moon. Supermoon. Snow Moon. Blood Moon. Earth’s favourite satellite buddy has a name for every occasion. Yet the most glorious view of the full Moon we’ve seen to date has no name. That’s probably because it’s not indicative of an occasion, but a way of looking at our satellite. With your naked
Three years ago, a team of archaeologists in the United States proposed an extraordinary idea: the first human settlers in the Americas arrived at least 100,000 years earlier than we thought. The evidence came from a collection of mastodon bones and ancient stones dating back to around 130,000 years ago, which appeared to have been
Invisible structures generated by gravitational interactions in the Solar System have created a “space superhighway” network, astronomers have discovered. These channels enable the fast travel of objects through space, and could be harnessed for our own space exploration purposes, as well as the study of comets and asteroids. By applying analyses to both observational and
It’s safe to say if there was a Mensa for animals, corvids would be crowing about it. They can plan like us, make tools like us, and might even be consciously judging us for all we know. We get it, they’re super smart. Just to rub it in, there’s now evidence that their cognitive development
The Geminids meteor shower is likely to flaunt the brightest shooting stars of 2020. It peaks Sunday night. The shower is expected to produce about 120 yellow, green, orange, red, and blue shooting stars per hour. The brightest of these meteors leave glowing trails in their wake. The Moon won’t outshine any of the meteors,
A prototype of the future giant SpaceX rocket Starship – which the company hopes will become its go-to for Mars missions – crashed in a fiery explosion during a test launch along the Texas coast Wednesday. But the company line was upbeat as a livestream of the launch displayed the on-screen message “AWESOME TEST. CONGRATS
General relativity is a profoundly complex mathematical theory, but its description of black holes is amazingly simple. A stable black hole can be described by just three properties: its mass, its electric charge, and its rotation or spin. Since black holes aren’t likely to have much charge, it really takes just two properties. If you
Feasts are rare on the barren landscape of the ocean depths. So researchers couldn’t believe their luck when they stumbled on a feeding frenzy of deep-sea sharks chowing down on a fallen swordfish off the US coast in July 2019. But they never imagined they would also capture footage of one of those sharks becoming
We don’t know whether it was a boy or a girl. But this ancient child, a Neanderthal, only made it to about two years of age. This short life, lived about 41,000 years ago, was uncovered at a famous archaeological site in southwestern France, called La Ferrassie. The remains of several Neanderthals have been found
Using remote laser scanners mounted on helicopters, archaeologists have been able to peer below the forest canopy of the Amazon, revealing the layouts and links of ancient villages laid out like clock faces. While these so-called mound villages had been spotted before, the new surveying technology has revealed exactly how they were organised at scale,
The Asian honeybee (Apis cerana) isn’t just on the look-out for flowers. In some areas, it’s also on the prowl for poo. When threatened by a species of giant hornet (Vespa soror) – closely related to the murder hornet – workers will fly off to collect fresh animal faeces to smear carefully around the entrance
A new survey of the sky in X-rays has revealed a previously hidden structure in the Milky Way galaxy. Giant bubbles of X-radiation from the galactic centre have been found extending vast distances above and below the galactic plane. They’re so huge, they engulf the already known Fermi bubbles of gamma radiation – but, according
We already had a bit of an inkling that our nearest stellar neighbour might be an inhospitable place. In 2017, red dwarf Proxima Centauri was caught belching out a colossal flare 10 times more powerful than the largest eruptions from the Sun, dampening hopes for habitable conditions on the rocky world orbiting it, Proxima Centauri
If you’re a dog person, you know what it’s like to bond with these beautiful animals. You know that they can understand not only what you say to them, but also the way you say it. What you might not know, however, is just how much meaning they’re actually missing when you verbally communicate with
All of the Amazon’s splendid greenery. Every fish in the Pacific. Every microbe underfoot. Every elephant on the plains, every flower, fungus, and fruit-fly in the fields, no longer outweighs the sheer amount of stuff humans have made. Estimates on the total mass of human-made material suggest 2020 is the year we overtake the combined
The highest point on Earth got a bit higher Tuesday as China and Nepal finally agreed on a precise elevation for Mount Everest after years of debate. The agreed height of 8,848.86 metres (29,031 feet) – unveiled at a news conference in Kathmandu – was 86 centimetres (2.8 feet) higher than the measurement previously recognised
A Canadian teenager from Fort McMurray, Alberta has won a major scientific competition for an electrifying YouTube video in which she brilliantly simplifies the complicated concept of quantum tunnelling. Maryam Tsegaye, a 17-year-old student from École McTavish Public High School, took home top prize at the sixth annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge for the explainer, in
Update: The launch was aborted at T – 1.3 seconds. Original text: SpaceX is about to attempt its most ambitious test launch yet of Starship-Super Heavy, a fully reusable rocket system that may one day slash the cost of reaching space by 1,000-fold. The aerospace company, founded by Elon Musk, aims to launch a three-engine, 16-story
In the face of rising seas, low-lying islands appear to be entirely vulnerable. Surrounded by ocean on all sides – with tides growing ever taller over time – these isolated landforms look like they have no place to go. Unless they can grow bigger. Strangely enough, some islands seem to be doing just that. While it
The Sun may be in for a very busy time. According to new predictions, the next maximum in its activity cycles could be the one of the strongest we’ve seen. This is in direct contradiction to the official solar weather forecast from NASA and the NOAA, but if it bears out, it could confirm a
It’s fair to say that medicine is one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. From finding plants that can dull pain or slow infection, to producing multiple highly effective vaccines in less than 12 months for a brand-new virus, we can be pretty proud of our achievements as a species. But we might not be the only
A team of Chinese scientists have developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world, capable of performing at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputers. In 2019, Google said it had built the first machine to achieve “quantum supremacy,” the first to outperform the world’s best supercomputers at quantum calculation, Live Science
Although we think of the cells inside of us and the organelles that make them up as pretty well mapped, it seems that there are still some surprises in store. A team of researchers has just published a paper describing a surprising structure existing within an organelle – one that has remained hidden in plain sight
Sir Isaac Newton, the acclaimed physicist, mathematician, and astronomer, may be one of the most renowned scientists of all time, but his wide-ranging research took him to strange places far outside what we now consider to be science. Amidst his outstanding legacy of academic output, numerous fragments and unpublished notes – many discovered after his
German divers who recently fished an Enigma encryption machine out of the Baltic Sea, used by the Nazis to send coded messages during World War II, handed their rare find over to a museum for restoration on Friday. The legendary code machine was discovered last month during a search for abandoned fishing nets in the
China successfully powered up its “artificial sun” nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, state media reported Friday, marking a great advance in the country’s nuclear power research capabilities. The HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China’s largest and most advanced nuclear fusion experimental research device, and scientists hope that the device can potentially unlock a powerful
New research suggests being a first-born child doesn’t have quite as much of an influence on your career choices as has been previously suggested – which is reassuring to know, no matter where you fit in the timeline of your siblings. An analysis of a longitudinal study that tracked 3,763 Americans across 50 years found no evidence
Mount Cleveland looks like the kind of volcano you made for a grade four science project and filled with vinegar and bicarb. More geological zit than powder keg, it pops and oozes every decade or so to thicken its igneous skin. There are five more like it nearby, making up what’s known as the Islands