NASA postponed a spacewalk on Tuesday due to a threat that’s becoming routine: space debris that might fly too close to the International Space Station (ISS). A pair of astronauts was supposed to don spacesuits, drift out of the ISS, and spend six-and-a-half hours replacing a faulty antenna system. But NASA announced early Tuesday that it had received a
Month: November 2021
We’ve seen how 3D-printing can revolutionize certain manufacturing processes – whether on Earth or anywhere else – but there’s a growing field of research looking at ways this can be applied to producing living, biological structures as well. In a new study, scientists have outlined a new type of ‘living ink’ or bioink made from
Knowing when to head out looking for food and when to stop and eat instead is an important judgment call for any species that wants to survive for an extended period of time – and the switch in the brain managing these behaviors has just been identified. While the discovery was made in the relatively
Even though jellyfish don’t have brains, scientists have figured out a way to read their minds – in a manner of speaking. With a clever bit of genetic tinkering, we can now watch how the neurons in a tiny species of see-through jellyfish work together to make complex autonomous movements, like grabbing and eating prey.
Without an explosion in ocean life more than 2 billion years ago, many of Earth’s mountains might never have formed, according to new research. When tiny organisms in the shallows of the sea, like plankton, die and sink to the bottom, they can add organic carbon to Earth’s crust, making it weaker and more pliable.
Scientists have unearthed the oldest fossils to date of the mysterious human lineage known as the Denisovans. With these 200,000-year-old bones, researchers have also for the first time discovered stone artifacts linked to these extinct relatives of modern humans, a new study finds. First identified a little more than a decade ago, the Denisovans –
Scientists have engineered what they say are the first self-replicating ‘robots’ ever made from living cells. At first, these freaky-looking ‘xenobots’ might seem notable for their superficial resemblance to Pac-Man, but their likeness to the video game character is probably the least strange thing about them. These unusual robotic creatures are a spin-off of what
Earth is our Solar System’s bluest planet, and yet no one really knows where all our water came from. The dust of a nearby asteroid has now revealed a potentially overlooked source: the Sun. Some water on our planet, it seems, might have been created by a river of charged particles, blown from the upper
The self-help industry is booming, fueled by research on positive psychology – the scientific study of what makes people flourish. At the same time, the rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm continue to soar worldwide. So are we doomed to be unhappy, despite these advances in psychology? According to an influential article published in Review
A major milestone in particle physics has just been made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). For the first time, candidate neutrinos have been detected, not just at the LHC, but in any particle collider. The six neutrino interactions, detected using the neutrino subdetector FASERnu, not only demonstrate the feasibility of the technology, they open
About 5,300 years ago, an ancient civilization emerged in the east of China, building a brilliant city the likes of which had perhaps never been seen before in all of Asia – nor possibly even the whole world. The surviving traces of the Liangzhu culture, which rose up along the banks of the Yangtze River
We just got a little more insight into stellar death by black hole. In a series of simulations, a team of astrophysicists has chucked a bunch of stars at a range of black holes, and recorded what happens. It’s the first study of its kind, the scientists said, that combines Einstein’s theory of general relativity
A quick and easy parent survey has allowed psychologists to track how children first develop their sense of humor – and what they find most funny. To date, it’s one of the best timelines we have of when kids start to make sense of certain jokes and funny acts. Some forms of humor even seem
Humans have amazing fingertips. They are sensitive and can be moved over objects to feel their softness, texture, size, and shape. These movements are both complex, and “task-specific”. This means that you adopt different movements depending on what you want to feel about an object. We squeeze or push objects to judge softness and feel
Scientists have developed an entirely new soft-yet-strong, squishy material that’s able to regain its original shape after being run over by a car – or to use a more natural example, after being walked over by an elephant. Made up of 80 percent water, the parts of the material that aren’t water enable it to
They were the largest animals to ever walk the Earth: sauropods, a dinosaur clade of such immense size and stature, they’re sometimes dubbed ‘thunder lizards’. These towering hulks – including Brontosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Diplodocus among others – needed four thick, powerful legs to support and transport their massive bodies. At least, most of the time.
With its large crater lake of turquoise water, plumes of smoke and sulfurous bubbling of mud and gases, the Krafla volcano is one of Iceland’s most awe-inspiring natural wonders. Here, in the country’s northeast, a team of international researchers is preparing to drill two kilometers (1.2 miles) into the heart of the volcano, a Jules
After a few years of avoiding physical touch, you’d be forgiven if you’re feeling a little out of practice. A study to identify the perfect hug is here to help. According to experiments conducted in the lab and in the real world before the pandemic began, people tend to get the most pleasure from hugs
Between music, podcasts, gaming, and the unlimited supply of online content, most people spend hours a week wearing headphones. Perhaps you are considering a new pair for the holidays, but with so many options on the market, it can be hard to know what to choose. I am a professional musician and a professor of
There’s a dead star behaving very oddly 1,300 light-years away. It’s a white dwarf named KPD 0005+5106, and X-ray data from the Chandra space telescope have revealed that it’s enacting extreme violence on an orbiting companion. Not only is it siphoning material from this object (which, to be fair, is pretty normal for white dwarfs),
She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a “peculiar large mass” floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand. The Kiwi passenger emailed photos of the strange ocean slick to scientists, who realized what it was – a raft
Barely a year after the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) broke one record for fusion, it’s smashed it again, this time holding onto a churning whirlpool of 100 million degree plasma for a whole 30 seconds. Though it’s well short of the 101 seconds set by the Chinese Academy of Sciences earlier this year,
After years of painstaking work, we’re homing in on bringing the total of confirmed exoplanets – planets outside the Solar System – to a whopping 5,000. In a major new haul for exoplanet studies, a team of astronomers has identified 366 previously unknown potential exoplanets in data from the retired Kepler space telescope. The key was
To the untrained eye, it may have looked like a giant wood log. In reality, scientists had spotted something unusual off the California coast two years ago: a 3-foot (1-meter) long mammoth tusk. A research team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered the tusk in 2019 while exploring an underwater mountain roughly 10,000
In spite of what most Australians would have you believe, the land Down Under isn’t a hot-bed of venomous arachnids. But every now and then, a spider emerges that gives even the most stoic of us a dose of arachnophobia. Take this stunning example of a female funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus) for example, recently handed
A group of scientists biked around Costa Rica’s tropical forests, hanging chunks of raw chicken from the trees, in April 2019. They were trying to catch a rare insect: carrion-eating bees. Slowly, over the next five days, large bees with long, dangling legs flocked to the bait. They crawled over the folds of raw chicken,
It doesn’t look like much. A little shorter than your thumb, perhaps, yellowed and scarred with age, and cracked clean through. But this small piece of mammoth ivory recovered from a cave in what is now Poland has turned out to be an amazing and important piece of human history. According to a new archaeological
The UK has officially recognized octopuses and crabs as sentient beings – finally catching up to well-established science on these intelligent animals. “The science is now clear that decapods and cephalopods can feel pain and therefore it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation,” UK Animal Welfare Minister Lord Zac
The Pentagon is creating a new office to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs) amid concerns that after broad probes it cannot explain mysterious sightings near highly sensitive military areas. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, working with the US director of national intelligence, ordered the new investigatory body to be established in the US Defense
The space around the Milky Way isn’t vacant. It’s swarming with dwarf galaxies – small, faint, and low in mass, with as few as around 1,000 stars each. This is not unusual. We know from our observations of other large galaxies that dwarf galaxies often congregate nearby, and can become captured in the gravitational field
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life and soared through the dark California skies early Wednesday, carrying a small probe that could teach NASA how to save Earth from dangerous asteroids. NASA isn’t aware of any asteroids headed for Earth in the next 100 years. But the agency expects enormous space rocks to approach our planet eventually,
The poisonous toxins of milkweed plants seem to have caused an evolutionary cascade through multiple layers in the food web, causing the same genetic mutations in bugs, worms, mice, and birds. Monarch butterflies were among the first insects found with this special genomic twist, which allows them to feed on the toxic cardiac glycosides produced
Peering deeper below the surface of Earth can tell us a lot about its history and geological make-up, and it’s the same for any other planet. Now the InSight lander on the surface of Mars has provided our first in-depth look at what lies just beneath the red planet’s surface. The seismometer on board InSight
A newly discovered exoplanet is one of the most extreme discovered yet. Its name is TOI-2109b, an absolute beast of a gas giant clocking it at 1.35 times the size and 5 times the mass of Jupiter. Oh, and it has a death wish: It’s on such a close orbit with its host star that
Sometime between 7-6 million years ago, our primate ancestors stood up and began to walk on two legs. A defining moment along the winding evolutionary roads to becoming human, this is the feature researchers use to distinguish hominins from other apes. Although why it occurred remains an intriguing mystery. By about 2 million years ago,
Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t ‘exist’ outside the minds of the people who use it. But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents
Most humans alive today are never going to go to Mars. It’s probably for the best, really. Without some serious fixes in place, Mars is extremely inhospitable to human survival. But we still dream lofty dreams of planting our feet on alien ground and staring at incredible alien horizons. Luckily for us, we have the
In the Wasatch Mountains of the western US on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones. Although it
The rate of childhood death in prehistoric times was not nearly as dire as we’ve been led to believe, according to new research. It’s often reported that nearly 40 percent of all prehistoric babies died within the first year of their lives. But when anthropologists in Australia analyzed a decade’s worth of modern United Nations
Albert Einstein’s handwritten notes for the theory of relativity fetched a record 11.6 million euros (US$13 million) at an auction in Paris on Tuesday. The manuscript had been valued at around a quarter of the final sum, which is by far the highest ever paid for anything written by the genius scientist. It contains preparatory
When it finally launches, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will give us our best look yet at the Universe around us – it’s the largest and most powerful telescope humans have ever built, and a new preprint study says it could spot potential signs of alien life in as little as 20 hours of
A dead star is spinning so rapidly, it officially has the fastest known spin rate of any star of its kind. It’s a white dwarf star, named LAMOST J024048.51+195226.9 (J0240+1952 for short) and located 2,015 light-years away, and it has an insane rotation rate of just 25 seconds. That pips the previous record holder by
Distances in space are hard. Unless you know precisely how intrinsically bright something is, working out how far away it is is extremely difficult. And there’s a lot of stuff out there in the cosmos for which intrinsic brightness is not well defined. This means that we can get distances very wrong sometimes. Case in
Meteor impact sites might seem like easy things to recognize, with giant craters in Earth’s surface showing where these far-flung objects finally came to a violent stop. But it’s not always that way. Sometimes those impact scars are healed over, disguised by layers of dirt and vegetation, or worn smooth again by the elements over
Beginning in the second trimester of pregnancy, an expecting parent may feel their unborn baby kicking, rolling over, and even hiccupping. But is it known whether babies can start crying before they’re born? Although pregnant people can’t feel this movement, research suggests that babies do seem to start practicing for this big birth milestone before
Terraforming Mars is one of the great dreams of humanity. Mars has a lot going for it. Its day is about the same length as Earth’s, it has plenty of frozen water just under its surface, and it likely could be given a reasonably breathable atmosphere in time. But one of the things it lacks
A weird quantum effect that was predicted decades ago has finally been demonstrated – if you make a cloud of gas cold and dense enough, you can make it invisible. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used lasers to squeeze and cool lithium gas to densities and temperatures low enough that it scattered less light. If they can
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the
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