Ever since the Dead Sea Scrolls were accidentally discovered over 70 years ago in a cave in Israel, they have been a source of fascination. The scrolls are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. But exactly who wrote these important documents has been a mystery. Now, thanks to the use of
admin
NASA’s Perseverance rover keeps making history. The six-wheeled robot has converted some carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen, the first time this has happened on another planet, the space agency said Wednesday. “This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s
Radioactive dust deep beneath the ocean waves suggests that Earth is moving through a massive cloud left behind by an exploded star. Continuously, for the last 33,000 years, space has been seeding Earth with a rare isotope of iron forged in supernovae. It’s not the first time that the isotope, known as iron-60, has dusted
There’s been a fabulous new achievement in particle physics. For the first time, scientists have managed to image the orbits of electrons within a quasiparticle known as an exciton – a result that has allowed them to finally measure the excitonic wave function describing the spatial distribution of electron momentum within the quasiparticle. This achievement
Traces of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s can still be found in American honey, new research reveals. The radioactive isotope identified, cesium-137, falls below levels considered to be harmful – but the amounts measured nonetheless emphasize the lingering persistence of environmental contaminants in the nuclear age, even a half-century after
There’s a pervasive notion in our society that nature is something outside, over there, other, from what we are as humans. From religious texts teaching that God provided humans with dominion over Earth, to futuristic literature pitching nature as our past and human ingenuity and technology as our future, the narrative that humans are beyond
An enormous Antarctic iceberg whose journeys were probably the most well-documented in history has now melted away to nothing in the Atlantic ocean. A68 cracked off the Larsen C ice sheet on the Antarctic Peninsula in 2017 as one of the biggest icebergs ever. At the time, it measured 2,240 square miles (5,800 square kilometers), about the
The first meteor shower of spring is peaking Thursday morning. The Lyrid meteor shower, which happens in late April each year, occurs when the Earth passes through the tail of a comet. As debris from that comet enters our planet’s atmosphere, it burns up, leaving streaks in the sky that are visible to the naked
There’s more than 32 times as much energy in a magnitude 8 earthquake as there is in a magnitude 7 earthquake – and scientists have discovered a natural ‘gate’ that controls which quakes are allowed to increase up to that highest scale. The gate in question is at the Alpine Fault in New Zealand. A
The problem starts with Brazil nuts. The large edible seeds are a common fixture in mixed nut bags, but they’re not to everyone’s liking – especially since they get dry and bitter once past the peak of freshness. And to make matters worse, they always rise to the top. The phenomenon, colloquially known as the
The dirt scattered across the floor of an ancient, remote cave in Mexico has yielded a new source of viable ancient DNA. For the first time, scientists have sequenced ancient DNA from soil samples – and it’s all thanks to the Upper Paleolithic bears that prolifically used the cave as their toilet around 16,000 years
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter took flight on Mars for the first time on Monday – and the Perseverance rover captured the entire feat in sharp video. The rover, which carried Ingenuity almost 300 million miles to Mars, perched on an overlook 64 meters (211 feet) away and watched the historic flight take place at 3:34 am
As the climate crisis causes havoc in temperature and rainfall patterns around the world, one of the many crops under threat is humanity’s precious coffee. Now scientists have identified a coffee-making plant that could be more robust against the rigors of the shifting seasons. The plant is stenophylla coffee or Coffea stenophylla, a wild and relatively
A wispy ring of dust that circles the Sun along the orbital path of Venus has just been revealed in the most detail yet, thanks to instruments carried by the Parker Solar Probe. The pristine, white-light images, taken from inside the orbit of Venus, show the ring in almost its entirety. This is vital data
After a series of delays, the first-ever powered flight to happen on another planet is go for liftoff. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is expected to rise into the Martian skies today at 03:30 am EDT, with data about its adventure arriving here on Earth a few hours later, transmitted in a livestream for all of us
Few spiders elicit as much reaction from humans as the famous and feared tarantula. These giant, hairy arachnids are known for their remarkable size, brilliant colors, and distinctive physical attributes. But it’s not just the tarantula itself that is so impressively (albeit unsettlingly) large. So is the creature’s footprint on the globe – which is
In a complete redefinition of the concept of ‘cute’, an international team of paleontologists has identified the tiniest known stegosaur footprint. Preserved in the stone in the Xinjiang Province of China for 100 million years, the print measures just 5.7 centimeters (2.24 inches) long, and was probably made by a baby stegosaur (ichnogenus Deltapodus) around
NASA on Saturday said its Ingenuity helicopter may take flight on Mars as soon as Monday 19 April. A flight is planned for 3:30 am EDT (07:30 UTC) after a series of delays pushed the scheduled take-off back. Data is expected to arrive on Earth a few hours later, the agency said in a press release.
More than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve probably at least heard of Zoom fatigue – if not experienced it yourself – and now a new study has dug deeper into the reasons for it happening. One of the primary drivers behind this video calling weariness seems to be what the researchers are calling “mirror anxiety”,
We haven’t been dependent on natural light from the Sun since the invention of the light bulb in 1879. Nowadays, many people spend most of the day not just in artificially lit rooms but also looking at screens – phones, computers, and TVs. Recently, there have been concerns that looking at bright screens in the evening
Google Earth gives you a fascinating 3D tour of the planet in your web browser, and the app’s newest feature lets you look back from the current day all the way to 1984 – so you can see how climate change has changed the face of Earth over the last 37 years. Google itself has
Algorithms can help us with everything, from choosing what music to listen to next to finding the cheapest flight online. Now, new research reveals one of the tipping points that tend to make us trust a computer’s judgment rather than a human’s. The findings offer an interesting insight into how ready we’ve become to let
NASA has selected SpaceX to land the first astronauts on the surface of the Moon since 1972, the agency said Friday, in a huge victory for Elon Musk‘s company. The contract, worth $2.9 billion, involves the prototype Starship spacecraft that is being tested at SpaceX’s south Texas facility. “Today I’m very excited, and we are
For a couple of hundred years, Cahokia was the place to be in what is now the US state of Illinois. The bustling, vibrant city was at one time home to some 15,000 people, but by the end of the 14th century it was deserted – and researchers still aren’t sure why. A new study
The last ice age was a bad time for wildlife. The world froze, ecosystems changed, and humans and animals competed fiercely for available resources. By 11,700 years ago, as the ice age drew to a close, most of the large mammals roaming what is now the Yukon Territory in Canada had gone extinct; the large
A small, flying reptile glides beneath the canopy of an ancient forest, scouring the trees for tasty bugs. She spots a cicada buzzing in the boughs of a ginkgo tree, then swoops down to snatch it up in her beak. The bug flees; the reptile follows, grasping swiftly along the branches with her sharp claws
Our plastic pollution problem has become so bad that microplastics are now embedded in the regular cycles of the atmosphere, circulating around the planet like oxygen or water, according to a new study. Plastic particles sent up into the air from ocean spray and road surfaces travel across continents and reaching the most remote spots
Early into the pandemic it became clear that something was wrong: the first signs of a tangential and potentially deadly threat emerging in the wake of COVID-19. It was an old problem, in truth, but one given fresh potency as humans scrambled to protect themselves from the coronavirus. As production of single-use face masks and
Although it’s extremely difficult to directly image the shadow of and the space around a black hole, that’s not the only tool astronomers have in their kit. Based on years of observations and analysis, there’s a decades-long tradition of black hole visualizations, going all the way back to the work of French astronomer Jean-Pierre Luminet
An alphabetic inscription written on a jar fragment found at the site of Tel Lachish in Israel and dating back around 3,450 years may provide a “missing link” in the history of the alphabet, a team of researchers said. “Dating to the fifteenth century BCE, this inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the
A new formula for white paint has given us the whitest white yet. It reflects a jaw-dropping 98.1 percent of all light that hits it, remaining significantly cooler than the ambient temperature, even when sitting in full sunlight. If used to coat buildings, its inventors say, the paint could help in the fight against global
Few things excite biologists more than contemplating the parts of the world still relatively free of human damage. For the last 30 years, scientists intent on protecting Earth’s biodiversity have sought to enshrine targets for preserving and expanding these remaining areas of wilderness. But what actually is wilderness, and how do we know when we’ve
For two and a half million years, the most infamous of predators, Tyrannosaurus rex, slowly stomped its way around what is today North America’s western coast. Scientists have now come up with an estimate for the total number of T. rex’s that ever existed: around 2.5 billion (yes, billion). This may sound like a lot – and it’s
If you could cross a monkey with a human, what might that creature tell us? We are beginning to find out. In a pioneering and controversial experiment, scientists successfully created just such a hybrid: a chimeric combination of monkey and human cells, existing together in a living embryo that otherwise would never have been conceived
Telescopes from across the globe have teamed up to take unprecedented images of supermassive black hole M87* as it blasts matter into space at 99 percent the speed of light. This is the same famous black hole that was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and unveiled in 2019. That first release was a spectacular achievement. It
If Planet Nine is out there, a large, mysterious planet lurking at the dark edges of the Solar System, it may not be where we thought it might be. According to astronomers searching for the hypothetical object, new information taken into account could mean that its orbit is significantly more elliptical than most recently predicted.
Earth’s suit of geomagnetic armor has a chink, and it’s growing. A weak spot in our planet’s magnetic field, located above the southern Atlantic Ocean, has been increasing in size over the last two centuries, and it’s starting to split in two. For those of us on the ground, this isn’t cause for concern: The protective field
New Zealand will force banks to reveal the impact their investments have on climate change under world-first legislation intended to make the financial sector’s environmental record transparent, officials said. Commerce Minister David Clark said the law would make climate reporting mandatory for banks, insurance companies and investment firms. “Becoming the first country in the world
NASA’s $800 million Mars lander is in an energy crisis. InSight, which landed in a Martian plain called Elysium Planitia in 2018, has detected more than 500 Mars quakes, felt more than 10,000 dust devils pass by, and started to measure the planet’s core. But over the past few months, InSight has been fighting for its life
To make some of the most precise measurements we can of the world around us, scientists tend to go small – right down to the atomic scale, using a technique called atom interferometry. Now, for the first time, scientists have performed this kind of measurement in space, using a sounding rocket specially designed to carry
A series of newly surfaced images and videos of unidentified flying objects filmed by the US Navy have now been confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon. While many in the public generally refer to such mysterious sightings as UFOs, the more modern term used in defense circles is ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena‘ (UAPs) – and they’re
The more we study the Universe, the more it seems likely that each galaxy is orbiting a cosmic colossus – a supermassive black hole, powering the galactic nucleus. There’s a lot we don’t know about these giant objects – including the glaring question of how they grow so huge – but new research could help
Japan’s decision to release more than one million tonnes of treated radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea has stirred fierce controversy. Here are some questions and answers about the plan, expected to take decades to complete. What is the processed water? Since the 2011 nuclear disaster, radioactive water has accumulated
You may not give a pile of bat poop gathered over 4,300 years a second look – but to a group of scientists, it’s provided an intriguing insight into how bat diets and therefore climate conditions have shifted over thousands of years. Taller than the average man (2 meters or 6-and-a-half feet), the pile of
The last ice age persisted for over 100,000 years. An ice-bound eternity by any stretch of the imagination, but this long winter was not completely frozen into stillness. During the Last Glacial Period, which ended approximately 12,000 years ago, climate change existed as a powerful phenomenon, much as it does now, albeit for different reasons.
Spiders rely quite significantly on touch to sense the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered in tiny hairs and slits that can distinguish between different kinds of vibrations. Prey blundering into a web makes a very different vibrational clamor from another spider coming a-wooing, or the stirring of a breeze, for example.
Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk released a video showing how his company Neuralink – a brain-computer-interface company – had advanced its technology to the point that the chip could allow a monkey to play video games with its mind. Neuralink could transition from operating on monkeys to human trials within the year, if the startup meets
Precipitation is much more widespread throughout the Solar System than commonly assumed. Obviously it rains water on Earth. But it snows carbon dioxide on Mars, rains methane on Titan, sulfuric acid on Venus, and could potentially rain diamonds on Neptune. The type of material falling out of the sky is almost as varied as the planets themselves. New research
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 103
- Next Page »