Can a computer learn from the past and anticipate what will happen next, like a human? You might not be surprised to hear that some cutting-edge AI models could achieve this feat, but what about a computer that looks a little different – more like a tank of water? We have built a small proof-of-concept
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Tigers may not change their stripes, but Jupiter sure does. The giant planet’s surprisingly neat, alternating bands of dark and light clouds periodically change their appearance, but the reason for these cyclic variations is a mystery. Now, after studying data on Jupiter’s magnetic field collected by the Juno probe, a team of scientists from Japan,
Engineers have demonstrated something marvelous. Almost any material can be used to create a device that continuously harvests energy from humid air. It’s not a development that’s ready for practical application, but it does, its creators say, transcend some of the limitations of other harvesters. All the material needs is to be pocked with nanopores
Ask anyone living in a coastal area of the UK and they’ll confirm that seagulls can be a nuisance. These birds’ pilfering of food knows no bounds, and no one is safe from one of their thieving attacks. For many people, this behavior is the result of the gulls’ inherent aggression. But in reality, gulls
A reconstruction of oral microflora genomes spanning a whopping 100,000-year period of human history may have revealed a surprising shift in the kinds of bacteria that like to call our mouths home. Researchers from across Germany and the US teamed up to decode DNA extracted from the dental plaque of human and Neanderthal remains, using
Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun, and so that last time that planet’s north polar region was pointed at Earth, radio telescope technology was in its infancy. But now, scientists have been using radio telescopes like the Very Large Array (VLA) the past few years as Uranus has slowly revealed more and more
The pressure to publish or perish has led some desperate researchers to pay for fake papers to pad their resumés. Worse still, some of these sham papers are getting published in official scientific journals. A computer program designed to detect these made-up studies suggests far too many are slipping past peer review. The study was
Fungi pose a significant threat to crops worldwide, scientists warn in a new commentary, with increasingly “devastating” effects on our food supply. We tend to worry more about pathogens that sicken humans directly, especially viruses and bacteria. But while corn smut and stem rust might not scare us like Ebola or E. coli, maybe they
Astronomers have found a planet a mere 87 light years away that is almost exactly the same size as Earth, orbiting its star at a distance that is neither roasting nor frozen. Sounds perfect for Earth 2.0, right? Not so fast. The exoplanet known as LP 791-18d has been tugged so far out of an
Cats have a reputation for aloofness (and flooffiness), but if you and your feline friend aren’t bonding, maybe you’re just not speaking their language. Never fear – research from 2020 has shown that it’s not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more. Not the human way, by baring your teeth, but the
Diplomats from 175 countries gathering in Paris for plastics treaty talks on Monday may want to pack an umbrella, but not just because there’s a chance of rain. France’s capital will also be showered during the five-day talks by billions of microplastic particles falling from the sky, according to the first-ever plastics pollution weather forecast.
New research reveals that mushrooms and other fungi can keep themselves cooler than their surroundings. The discovery could tell us more about these organisms’ evolution and how they might respond to continued global warming. Like some of the best scientific discoveries, this temperature regulation was discovered accidentally, as one of the researchers was testing out
With technology increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, it is becoming more important to understand space weather and its impacts on tech. When one hears “space weather“, one typically thinks of huge explosions on the Sun – coronal mass ejections hurled towards Earth, creating beautiful displays of aurora. However, not all space weather starts at
At the heart of a glob of stars drifting through the Milky Way lurks a beast. Located some 6,000 light-years away, a globular cluster known as Messier 4 appears to be clumped around a black hole some 800 times the mass of our Sun. That’s no featherweight, but it’s far from a colossus either. In
Orcas living off Europe’s Iberian coast recently struck and sunk a yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar. Scientists suspect that this is the third vessel this subpopulation of killer whales has capsized since May 2020, when a female orca believed to be the originator of this behavior suffered a traumatic encounter with a boat. In
We don’t know what the first stars in the Universe were like. Peering into the distant reaches of the early Universe, we’ve seen only traces of their presence. But a new line of evidence traced in images from the James Webb Space Telescope seems to agree with a recent idea that is gaining traction: that
What started as a single cell in 2018, invisible to the human eye, has now evolved into a multicellular beast about the size of a flea. An ongoing study on a brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) mutated to remain attached in clusters as ‘snowflake’ yeast shows what can happen to microscopic single-celled organisms after thousands of
A sunspot four times the size of Earth is lined up with the Sun right now and it’s so big that an astronomer said it could be seen with the naked eye – provided you’ve got the right equipment to observe it safely. Astronomer Bum-Suk Yeom from South Korea advised amateur astronomers to reach for
‘Flesh-eating’ bacteria have been found thriving on seaweed blooms and plastic pollution in the open Caribbean Ocean, and researchers worry the potential pathogens could come back to bite us. Vibrio bacteria are known to feast on marine plant and animal tissues on the coastline. When humans consume seafood or seawater infected with these pathogens, they
Nurturing a forest ecosystem back to life after it’s been logged is not always easy. It can take a lot of hard work and careful monitoring to ensure biodiversity thrives again. But monitoring biodiversity can be costly, intrusive, and resource-intensive. That’s where ecological acoustic survey methods, or “ecoacoustics”, come into play. Indeed, the planet sings.
Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness. The dying star’s regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time
A decades-old global environmental pact has averted huge amounts of sea ice loss in the Arctic, new research shows. Banning ozone-depleting gases under the historic 1987 Montreal Protocol has delayed the first, feared ice-free Arctic summer by as much as 15 years, the study found – once again demonstrating that global treaties can work to
Current policies to limit global warming will expose more than a fifth of humanity to extreme and potentially life-threatening heat by century’s end, researchers warned Monday. Earth’s surface temperature is on track to rise 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100, pushing more than two billion people – 22 percent of
Scientists using ultraviolet photography say they have found an old version of a chapter of the Bible that was hidden underneath a different section of text for more than 1,500 years. Historian Grigory Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences announced the discovery in an article in the journal, New Testament Studies, earlier this year.
There’s a fair amount of water in the Solar System. Several moons and planets are loaded with it, while comets from the far reaches are packed with the stuff. Where it warms in the heat of the Sun, it sublimates into a gas that drifts into the vacuum of space. While water ice has been
The next time you whisper sweet-nothings into someone’s ear, you might want to target their left side. Neuroscientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne University Hospital and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have discovered a strange bias in our perception of pleasing voices. According to the brain scans of 13
The largest and most powerful solar telescope on Earth has just given us breathtaking new views of the surface of the Sun. In a series of new images, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope’s observations reveal the intricate details of sunspot regions, the roiling convective cells, and the motion of plasma in the solar atmosphere
France is preparing for temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels in the country by century’s end as the world falls short in meeting climate change targets, a cabinet minister warned Sunday. Christophe Bechu, minister for ecological transition, told the weekly JDD paper that his government was no longer banking on
The Tyrannosaurus rex is dinosaur royalty, an iconic and instantly identifiable species – and according to a new study, as many as 1.7 billion of these beasts roamed Earth before an unfortunate meeting with an asteroid. It takes a lot of number crunching to figure this out, everything from average lifespan to sexual maturity to
The feathers, fur, and scales that adorn different members of the animal kingdom may look quite different, but they’re all made of the same basic stuff. And, as it turns out, it only takes a relatively simple genetic tweak to produce one instead of the other. By targeting the sonic hedgehog (Shh) gene, geneticists Michel
The delicious way that champagne bubbles tickle the tongue is based on how ‘soapy’ the wine is, according to new research. When poured into a glass, carbonated drinks don’t all fizz the same way. Sparkling water creates a firework-like display of popping bubbles, bursting forth across the entire surface of a glass. Beer has bubbles
Typically when you think of a satellite, you think of a metal box with electronic components inside it. But that is simply because most satellites have been made that way throughout history. There is nothing against using other materials to build satellites. Now, a team of researchers from Japan has completed testing on another type
A team of chemists from Osaka University in Japan have identified a rare property in a crystal. When exposed to the cool glow of ultraviolet (UV) light, the solid organic material transforms into a liquid. What’s more, this crystal undergoes an interesting series of changes in its luminescence as it melts that point to changes
Human history is intimately entwined with the use and control of fire. However, working out when our relationship with fire began and how it subsequently evolved has been notoriously difficult. This is partly due to the incomplete nature of archaeological records, and also because fire use was fleeting, making burnt remains difficult to detect. But
Earth’s hot and churning insides are largely still a mystery to scientists. Even at shallower depths, the crusty exterior of our planet contains plenty of unknowns. Magma deep in Earth’s mantle that rises to form continental crust is inherently different to the magma that seeps from mid-ocean ridges. Molten material that bursts from volcanoes on
How thick is the crust of Mars? This question is what a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters attempted to answer as it reported on data from a magnitude 4.7 marsquake recorded in May 2022 by NASA’s InSight lander, which remains the largest quake ever recorded on another planetary body. As it turns out,
All the planets in our Solar System with global magnetic fields have radiation belts, donut-shaped regions confined by magnetic fields where particles are trapped and accelerated, glowing in radio light. This all suggests that there should also be radiation belts wherever there is a stable, global magnetic field. Detecting the faint emission from an extrasolar
Mounting evidence suggests humans are now a major driving force of evolution on Earth. From selective breeding to environmental modifications, we’re altering so much of our world that we’re not only now driving the climate, but the direction of life itself. In a massive project involving 287 scientists across 160 cities in 26 countries, researchers
Signed in 1987, the Montreal Protocol agreement led to a significant decrease in chemicals and pollutants known to damage Earth’s precious ozone layer. While their absence has allowed the protective gas to replenish high in the atmosphere, one damaging substance seems to have slipped through the cracks, potentially slowing the layer’s repair or even putting
The human family tree is a tangle of twisted branches. Parting the foliage to disentangle the stem of our own species is not so easy. The classic out-of-Africa hypothesis suggests that Homo sapiens evolved from a distinct lineage of early human that evolved around 150,000 years ago before setting off to spread through Europe and
When Oumuamua travelled through our Solar System back in 2017, people around the world paid attention. It was the first Interstellar Object (ISO) astronomers had ever identified. Then in August 2019, Comet 2I Borisov travelled through our Solar System, becoming the second ISO to cruise through for a visit. Together, the visiting ISOs generated a
A new deep dive into humanity’s history of romantic kissing has revealed that locking lips has a more complex story than some researchers have proposed. Though smooching one’s love interest might not be a human-only past time, not all cultures do it, leading to speculation over the behavior emerging in select localities before spreading like
Researchers have discovered the earliest examples of human footprints in Germany. They’re so old, it’s unlikely they were made by any species live today. Stretching back some 300,000 years through time, it’s thought they were made not by Homo sapiens, but by the ancient (and now extinct) ‘Heidelberg people’ (or Homo heidelbergensis). The impressions provide
A closer look at an intriguing star just 25 light-years away has revealed a much more complex architecture of debris than earlier observations had suggested. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found that the star named Fomalhaut – home to one of the first asteroid belts discovered outside the Solar System – is
When stars like our Sun die, they tend to go out with a whimper and not a bang – unless they happen to be part of a binary (two) star system that could give rise to a supernova explosion. Now, for the first time, astronomers have spotted the radio signature of just such an event
Researchers have just found a robust answer to the centuries-long mystery of which multicellular animal first existed on Earth. Sponges (Porifera) have long been a lead contender for the title of “first” due to their anatomic simplicity – like their lack of a nervous system – but as we’ve delved deeper into genetic histories, a
It is as inevitable as the rising of the Sun and the turning of the tides. Someday another large rock from space will crash into the Earth. It has happened for billions of years in the past and will continue to happen for billions of years into the future. So far humanity has been lucky,
One year in the next five will almost certainly be the hottest on record and there’s a two-in-three chance a single year will cross the crucial 1.5 °C global warming threshold, an alarming new report by the World Meteorological Organization predicts. The report, known as the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, warns if humanity
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