The concept of time travel has always captured the imagination of physicists and laypersons alike. But is it really possible? Of course it is. We’re doing it right now, aren’t we? We are all traveling into the future one second at a time. But that was not what you were thinking. Can we travel much
An invasive tick that feeds on humans, pets, livestock and wildlife is now making a new home for itself in the United States. The Asian longhorned tick (Haemaphysalis longicornis) is a potentially disease-carrying, blood-sucking species native to East Asia. Last year, however, this exotic pest was somehow found in the US state of New Jersey,
The radar signature meandered over southern Illinois for 10 hours on Monday. It definitely wasn’t precipitation, the National Weather Service said. But that seemed for days to be the only sure thing about the blob, which floated for nearly 140 miles (225 kilometres) before scattering into nothing after it crossed into western Kentucky. So what
There’s a kind of exoplanet out there that is suspiciously rare. We call them “hot Neptunes”, and only a few have been discovered among the 3,869 confirmed exoplanets. But astronomers have made an eye-watering discovery of an evaporating planet that could prove to be the missing link. Called Gliese 3470 b, this planet is losing
Deep under the ocean, in the dark, dark depths, marine scientists have discovered a new field of hydrothermal vents, hosting an ecosystem unlike any other – with a plethora of species that have never been seen before. It’s been named Jaich Maa, and it’s in the Pescadero Basin at the southern end of the Gulf
Two fire technicians have died after a generator incident occurred at one of the largest stations in Antarctica. According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), on 12 December, the two technicians were performing routine maintenance on a generator building’s fire suppression system. The generator powers a radio transmitter nearby the station. Unfortunately, the maintenance did not
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the first human-made object to fly into the Sun’s corona, completed its first solar flyby on November 11, collecting a wealth of unprecedented data about the workings of our magnificent home star. And now, weeks later, that data is arriving home. It may be a little bit of a wait for
Virgin Galactic launched a spacecraft more than 50 miles (80 km) high Thursday, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration’s definition of space and capturing a long-elusive goal for the company founded by Richard Branson that one day wants to fly tourists through the atmosphere. Though it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch
Scientists in Germany say they have hit a new superconductivity milestone. According to their paper, they achieved resistance-free electrical current at the highest temperature yet: just 250 Kelvin, or -23 degrees Celsius (-9.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Although the team’s superconducting material has yet to be verified, the claim has merit – the work was led by
How do fish breathe underwater? It’s the kind of question children ask. They get their oxygen in the water, we tell them – but sadly, that’s not always true. The world’s oceans are currently undergoing a dangerous transformation. Scientists have detected vast ‘dead zones’ around the world, where hypoxic water lacks the necessary oxygen for
A Chinese lander destined for the far side of the Moon – the side that always faces away from the Earth – has now entered lunar orbit, Space News reports. Early Wednesday morning, the spacecraft carrying the Chang’e-4 lander completed its journey from Earth, which took nearly five days, and settled into an elliptical orbit
Scattered among your genes like old recipes in an heirloom cookbook are DNA sequences that once helped Neanderthals survive. The codes that contributed to the construction of our extinct cousin’s ever-so-slightly elongated skulls could still be at work in some modern humans, affecting neurological development and pushing their craniums into a slightly different shape. Neanderthals
We are living on the planet of the chickens. The broiler (meat) chicken now outweighs all wild birds put together by three to one. It is the most numerous vertebrate (not just bird) species on land, with 23 billion alive at any one time. Across the world, chicken is the most commonly eaten meat. This
It’s something most of us can only ever dream of. You’re swimming in the ocean, minding your own business, when suddenly a family of sleek marine mammals materialises, joining you as you glide through the water. That’s what happened to not one, but two swimmers off the coast of New Zealand in recent weeks, as
Despite several warnings and some major red flags, the Australian government has allowed hundreds of rare and endangered birds to be sent to a zoo in Germany. The only problem is, some are not convinced that the destination is a real, legitimate zoo – at least, not one that the public can actually visit –
It took a little longer than expected, but by all accounts, Tuesday’s spacewalk was a success. At around 11:00 am ET (16:00 UTC), International Space Station (ISS) cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Prokopyev set out on a spacewalk expected to take about six hours. The purpose: examine a hole in the Soyuz capsule that some
NASA’s InSight lander has taken its first selfie on Mars. The selfie, released on Tuesday and shown above, is made up of 11 images that were stitched together. The resulting photo shows InSight’s solar panels and deck, along with the scientific instruments on top of the deck and the lander’s weather sensor. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) InSight landed
The Geminids meteor shower peaks on the mornings of December 13 and 14, 2018 – but if you look up any time there’s a clear night sky up until December 17, you might just catch a glimpse of a Geminid meteor. The Geminids shower is unusual as it is one of two meteor showers confirmed
Throughout Earth’s history, one question rises, again and again: what were the factors that killed off a species or a population of animals? Many of them are terrestrial in origin, but a mysterious event that killed off 36 percent of the ocean’s genera 2.6 million years ago in the Pliocene, including the famous giant, bus-sized
Even the tiniest organisms can make it to the big leagues. The number one fastest animal movement in the world now belongs to an ant no bigger than the tip of your finger. Ominously named the Dracula ant (Mystrium camillae), this minuscule species is shy and elusive, a subterranean predator that enjoys sucking the blood
You probably don’t stop to think about this often, but right after the birth of the Universe, matter was not in the form we recognise today. Instead, scientists think it was very much in a state of soup, ‘quark soup’ to be precise – a state also known as quark-gluon plasma. Now, researchers say they’ve managed
Last year, uptake of home DNA tests sailed into the stratosphere, giving millions of people around the world a whole new level of insight into the ways their genes work, and helping predict their genetic risk for disease. But knowledge is a dangerous thing. New research suggests this kind of genetic knowledge isn’t just informative,
Earth is not the home you think it is. Far below the scant surface spaces we inhabit, the planet is teeming with an incredibly vast and deep ‘dark biosphere‘ of subterranean lifeforms that scientists are only just beginning to comprehend. Hidden throughout this subsurface realm, some of the world’s deepest and oldest organisms thrive in
A lone spacecraft is hovering 12 miles above the surface of a tiny asteroid millions of miles away, closely examining its surface. And it just sent back its first readings. As part of NASA’s Origins Program, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft traveled to an asteroid called Bennu some 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the Sun,
On January 2, 2018, Kirstin Blaise Lobato, who was charged and convicted of murder, walked free from a Nevada prison due entirely to forensic entomology. Forensic entomologists study the insects colonizing a dead body to estimate how long they have been active on the body and infer time of death. What was so unusual in
Around 252 million years ago, Earth experienced catastrophic devastation – an extinction event so severe that it wiped out almost all of the life on Earth. Up to 70 percent of all land vertebrate species were killed off, and a massive 96 percent of all marine species, including the famous trilobite that had previously survived
Human activity has shifted the chemical composition of our waterways. Now, it’s beginning to corrode our freshwater supply. A new study has confirmed that in the last 25 years, at least a third of the rivers and streams in the United States have gotten saltier. If nothing is done to curb this trend, the results suggest
A drought scorched the Great Plains, causing wildfires and US$2.5 billion in agriculture losses. Catastrophic floods submerged more than a third of Bangladesh. Record-shattering heat waves killed scores of people in Europe and China. These were among 15 extreme weather events in 2017 that were made more likely by human-cased climate change, according to in-depth
About 11 billion miles from Earth, a NASA probe has broken another record for humanity. The space agency separately launched its twin Voyager spacecraft in 1977 with a mission to explore the outer Solar System. The car-size Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes exploited a rare alignment of the planets (and their gravitational fields) to
Being in space can have weird and sometimes harmful effects on the human body, and we’ll have to work through those issues if we’re to make it out to Mars and beyond, and stay healthy. But it looks like we have finally found one feature of the human body that’s untroubled by microgravity – and
Every 5.4 years, the comet 46P/Wirtanen orbits the Sun, swinging through Earth’s skies on its way. This year, its visit is in December, and we’re going to be able to see it – in fact, it’s visible in the sky now if you have binoculars or a telescope. Usually, 46P/Wirtanen is too far away for
The island nation of Mauritius has little in the way of natural resources – historically, it’s depended on imported petroleum to generate electricity. But increasingly, according to Phys.org, leadership on the island is preparing for an energy-scarce future. They’re investing in solar, wind and hydropower, but also leveraging a key crop on the island: sugar
It’s the most populous city in Western Asia, and it’s sinking into the ground at an alarming rate. Tehran, the capital of Iran and home to some 15 million people in total across its greater urban footprint, is a victim of dramatic subsidence, new research reveals, which is causing the region to sink by more
When it comes to prodding the very boundaries of the Solar System we all reside in, astronomers have had a notoriously tricky time of figuring out where those edges truly lie. For example, it took a whole year to officially confirm that Voyager 1 had reached the interstellar medium of space – the first spacecraft
When Karl Martin of Derbyshire, England picked up a pair of pots for £4 (US$5) at a car boot sale, all he wanted was a nice jar to put his toothbrush in. And for five years, that’s precisely what he had. Imagine his surprise when that toothbrush jar, decorated with a painted antelope, turned out
NASA scientists released audio Friday of rumbles captured by its InSight lander on the surface of Mars. The sound recorded with InSight’s sensors on December 1 comes from vibrations caused by wind that NASA estimates was blowing at about 10 to 15 mph (16 to 24 km/h). InSight, which is an acronym for “Interior Exploration
When your computer stores data, it has to pause while the information moves from one piece of hardware to another. But that may soon stop being the case, as scientists from MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design uncovered a new manufacturing trick that should let them build computers that don’t have those
A retired professor from the UK says he might have pinpointed the location of Camelot, the legendary castle where stories claim that King Arthur held court some 1,400 years ago – if he actually existed. According to Arthurian literature expert Peter Field, Camelot used to stand at the site of an ancient Roman fort called Camulodunum in
Some of the world’s most important science is conducted in one of its most inhospitable, hostile places. But not without a cost, new research reveals. A new long-term analysis of researchers stationed in Antarctica sheds new light on a psychological phenomenon very few of us ever have to experience: a unique coping mechanism, triggered when
The name says it all, really. With the exception of some orange hairs in the rear, the black mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata) is predominantly covered in – you guessed it – pitch black fur. This is true for all the black howler monkeys in the forests of Central America and the north of South
When you know a particular topic really well, you might say you know it like the back of your hand. But how well do you really know that hand? Or the rest of your body, for that matter? People have a tendency to share misinformation that, over time, can be misconstrued as fact. The human body
As someone who has clocked an unseemly amount of hours on an MMO, I’m no stranger to the guilt that can come from habitual gaming. But the good news is there’s mounting evidence that the hobby can have a range of beneficial effects on your brain, including improved cognitive control, emotional regulation, spatial resolution of
What internet users Down Under say online will no longer be kept on the down low. On Thursday, Australia’s Parliament passed the Assistance and Access Bill. The legislation will force tech companies to help Australian authorities decrypt users’ online communications — and it could represent a major blow to data privacy elsewhere in the world.
A relaxed-looking juvenile Hawaiian monk seal lounges near a sandy white beach on some green foliage. Its eyes are half-closed, and it has a serene expression on its face. But the seal’s calm demeanor is surprising. Why? Well, there’s a long, black-and-white eel dangling from its right nostril. “It’s just so shocking,” Claire Simeone, a
Japan’s home prices may be rising, but the country still has more than 8 million unoccupied properties, so many that owners have started giving them away for free. In some cases, local governments are even offering subsidies for people willing to tear down homes and build new ones, according to The Japan Times. Though many
It’s official. At 2:23 am in southern China, a rocket carrying unique payload successfully launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. On board is a lander which, if all goes smoothly, will soon make history by touching down on the far side of the Moon. Liftoff for the Chang’e-4 lunar far side landing mission pic.twitter.com/TEfkEsz4F4
One of the best-known fossils in paleontology, a virtually complete skeleton nicknamed “Little Foot”, could actually represent an entirely new species of early human, scientists have announced. The fossil was first discovered more than 20 years ago, and after decades of careful extraction and research, an analysis of the age, skull and limbs has finally
The promise of quantum computing brings with it some mind-blowing potential, but it also carries a new set of risks, scientists are warning. Specifically, the enormous power of the tech could be used to crack the best cyber security we currently have in place. A new report on the “progress and prospects” of quantum computing
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