Researchers have developed artificial cells that can respond to external chemical forces, just like real ones do. This exciting step could get us closer to using synthetic biological structures in real-world situations, such as targeted drug delivery or cleaning up pollution. In this proof-of-principle study, scientists have succeeded in getting artificial cells to glow with
Month: July 2019
The ancient Egyptian city of Heracleion was once a bustling trading port. Now, it lies 45 metres (about 148 feet) under the Mediterranean Sea. Recently, divers have revealed perhaps the best find since the submerged city was rediscovered two decades ago. In their most recent underwater expedition, Egyptian and European experts have found significant remains
Astronomers have discovered a new main sequence star that’s the fastest of its kind ever found in the Milky Way. It’s hurtling through the galaxy at an eye-popping speed of around 1,700 kilometres per second, and it’s racing away from the centre of the galaxy. This also makes it the first star that astronomers can
Indian tiger numbers are up, according to one of the most detailed wildlife surveys ever conducted. Tiger populations have risen by 6 percent, to roughly 3,000 animals. The massive survey may set a new world standard in counting large carnivores. The encouraging results validate India’s impressive investments in tiger conservation. A mammoth effort Large, solitary
The Planetary Society has been busy recently. On June 25, its LightSail 2 launched into orbit; just last week on July 24, the craft opened its sails successfully, a key stage of its mission to demonstrate solar sailing in practice. And now, the nonprofit foundation has released a statement, revealing that tomorrow (July 31), there is
Tesla on Monday announced its largest battery product. Called Megapack, it’s designed to simplify the installation process for large energy-storage projects. Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours of energy and convert up to 1.5 megawatts of energy from a direct current (DC) to an alternating current (AC) so homes can use it.
Imagine trying to film an event that was over and done within a mere 125 trillionths of a second. It’s something that molecular physicists have long been dreaming of, and at last it seems they’ve achieved their goal. Using precisely tuned pulses of laser light, an international team of scientists from four different institutions has
Spare a thought for the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, not long for this world (in tectonic plate terms) as it slowly slides under the continent of North America. Geologists are hoping it can help solve one of the biggest mysteries in their field – how tectonic plates die. The Juan de Fuca plate is
The probable culprit behind a mysterious cloud of radioactive particles detected floating above much of Europe in 2017 appears to have been identified. The radiation spike – in the form of an extremely high airborne concentration of the radioactive isotope ruthenium–106 – was detected by scientists in October 2017, but the source of the dramatic
New images of the Majorana fermion have brought physicists a step closer to harnessing the mysterious objects for quantum computing. These strange objects – particles that acts as their own antiparticles – have a vast as-yet untapped potential to act as qubits, the quantum bits that are the basic units of information in a quantum
A bizarre and brilliantly effective optical illusion going viral on the internet tricks your brain into seeing a colour image… but if you look closer, you’ll notice the photo you’re staring at is only black and white. Created by digital media artist and software developer Øyvind Kolås as a visual experiment, the technique, which Kolås
Over 200 Svalbard reindeer have been found dead on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. That’s one of the highest recorded death tolls since population monitoring commenced in 1978, and scientists believe climate change played a key role. According to a report on the Norwegian Polar Institute’s website, the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus) suffered a lean
Many of us will have experienced that super friendly cat who seems to love being stroked one minute, only to bite or swipe at us the next. It might be easy at this point to blame it on the cat, but what’s likely happening here is that we’re just not stroking them right. To understand
The spinning ball of plasma that is our Sun produces a spinning magnetic field too, and where that magnetic field weakens, solar winds can escape. Now scientists have been able to recreate those same effects in a lab for the first time, meaning we can study the bizarre science around our star at close quarters,
There are some strange things down there, in the ocean depths, where crushing pressures and low light make for some bizarre adaptations. It’s not easy for humans to get down there, but remote-controlled submarines have, in recent years, been slowly revealing to us the strange wonders at the bottom of the sea. Like this: for
We may have discovered thousands of exoplanets, but few have astronomers as excited as a newly discovered system located just 73 light-years away. It could not only tell us about planet formation, it could lead us to the discovery of a habitable world. Around an unusually quiet red dwarf 73 light-years away, the planet-hunting TESS
For 38 excruciating minutes, Hawaii feared the worst. In January 2018, phones all over the Aloha State were buzzing with an emergency alert of unprecedented, catastrophic scale. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” the text message said. “SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Fortunately for the more than 1 million Hawaiians lying in
If this headline looks familiar to you, that’s because we wrote an almost identical one in 2016. Except back then, we were freaking out because we’d used a year’s worth of Earth’s resources by August 8. Now, three years later, we’ve accomplished this worrying milestone more than a week earlier. This year, July 29th marks Earth
Sometimes all you need is a wild weekend in Las Vegas, amongst the lights, sounds, and attractions of the Sin City. And it seems like grasshoppers are no exception, descending on Las Vegas last week in such numbers that you can even see them on the weather radar. 🤓 Some of you have been asking
When Japanese probe Hayabusa2 touched down on asteroid Ryugu on 11 July 2019, its camera was not sitting idle. The entire event was photographed using its small monitor cam (CAM-H). Now JAXA has compiled those images into an animation, showing the probe closing in to collect mineral samples, then bouncing back off again to resume
The warmer it gets, the more people crank up the air conditioning (AC). In fact, AC is booming in nations across the world: it’s predicted that around two thirds of the world’s households could have an air conditioner by 2050, and the demand for energy to cool buildings will triple. But unless the energy comes
Locals at the southern tip of Texas took in an otherworldly sight on Thursday night: A giant mirror-polished machine roared to life near a beach, and through a billowing cloud of orange-coloured smoke, rose six stories into the sky, hovered, and then gently landed. Though the launch lasted less than a minute, the late-night spectacle
Thanks to a chance observation during a woodland ramble, scientists have found evidence that trees can keep each other alive by sharing water and other resources – forming a type of ‘superorganism’ that works together to keep individuals alive. In this way, a tree stump has been able to survive and cycle water, even without
In the northern constellation of Ursa Minor, a star is dying. It’s not going quietly, either. It’s wracked by ‘coughs’ that send shockwaves expelling its outer material into the space around it. And this is giving us a glimpse of what’s going to happen to our own Sun, in just a few billion years. The star
A new disruptive technology is on the horizon and it promises to take computing power to unprecedented and unimaginable heights. And to predict the speed of progress of this new “quantum computing” technology, the director of Google’s Quantum AI Labs, Hartmut Neven, has proposed a new rule similar to the Moore’s Law that has measured
If you think climate change is only gradually affecting our natural systems, think again. Our research, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, looked at the large-scale impacts of a series of extreme climate events on coastal marine habitats around Australia. We found more than 45 percent of the coastline was already affected by extreme weather
Research on robotic prostheses is coming along in leaps and bounds, but one hurdle is proving quite tricky to overcome: a sense of touch. Among other things, this sense helps us control our grip strength – which is vitally important when it comes to having fine motor control for handling delicate objects. Enter a new
I am a scientist who researches climate hazards. This week I have published research on the potential for a catastrophic cyclone-heatwave combo in the global south. Yet over the past few days I have been approached by various media outlets to talk not about that hazard, but about the unfolding UK heatwave and climate change.
It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it’s an interesting take
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and after the hottest June ever recorded on Earth, the region is literally on fire. From Greenland to Siberia to Alaska, huge swathes of flame and smoke are wrapping themselves around the upper Northern Hemisphere of our planet, like a suffocating scarf.
The International Space Station (ISS) is the single biggest spacecraft ever built, and one of the most sophisticated machines put in orbit by human kind. Against the fiery backdrop of our Sun, however, the achievement – roughly the size of a football field – looks decidedly puny. A dazzling picture, taken in broad daylight by photographer
A 100-metre-wide (328-feet-wide) asteroid passed just 70,000 kilometers from Earth on Thursday, Australian time. It was discovered by the Brazilian SONEAR survey just days ago, and its presence was announced mere hours before it zoomed past our planet. The lack of warning shows how quickly potentially dangerous asteroids can sneak up on us. The asteroid,
The waxing and waning of sunspots forms part of our Sun’s natural cycle, but it’s a phenomenon astronomers still don’t fully understand. Now, new research has revealed that particular “terminator” events are what brings sunspot cycles to an end, and it means we could get better at predicting them. That would be rather useful, too.
When it comes to lavish funeral arrangements, you’d have to do well to beat the mystery soldier buried some 2,000 years ago in the south of England. A new exhibition is about to reveal some of the details of this man and his burial site, described as “the most elaborately equipped warrior’s grave” ever found
Facebook’s Messenger Kids is supposed to provide parents complete control over who their children chat can with on the app. But as The Verge reported on Monday, that key promise appears to have been broken, thanks to a design flaw with the app. According to the report, Messenger Kids had a design flaw that allows
Another test of a star orbiting our galaxy’s supermassive black hole at insane speeds has once again upheld the theory of general relativity as described by Albert Einstein in 1915. As it hurtled around the black hole on its closest approach, the light of a star named S2 was stretched out by the intense gravitational
Solar cells that transfer sunlight into electricity are a brilliant part of modern technology, but one particular aspect has proven to be a huge headache. They’re not super efficient – most of the sunlight they absorb is lost in the form of heat. As a result, the average efficiency of a commercial solar panel is
When it comes to our physical world, scientific research indicates that size really does matter. While “big” objects, anything from a grain of sand to a galaxy, abide by one set of rules – classical physics – tiny objects, such as atoms and particles, abide by an entirely different set, a discovery that gave birth
Explorer Robert Ballard has found enough sunken ships to start a modest ghost fleet. The Titanic. The carrier USS Yorktown lost at Midway. President John F. Kennedy’s patrol boat sunk in the warm Solomon Sea. Ancient vessels in the Black Sea knotted with mariner skeletons. Now, after decades of finding the nearly unfindable, Ballard will
A historic heat wave is bringing unprecedented temperatures to Western Europe, and is poised to expand northeastward to Scandinavia and into the Arctic by late this weekend. Once above the Arctic Circle, the weather system responsible for this heat wave could accelerate the loss of sea ice, which is already running at a record low
YouTube is far more than just a video-sharing website. The online platform, which hosts almost two billion users each month, is an archive, a laboratory, a news outlet and an educational tool. It’s also a goldmine for climate conspiracy theories. But if you are using YouTube to learn about climate science, an exploratory research project
Finding cheap and practical ways of removing salt from seawater could potentially help some of the 844 million people worldwide without regular access to clean water – and scientists just found a new nanoscale method for doing just that. Using a tiny disc made of super-hydrophilic filter paper, layered with carbon nanotubes for light absorption,
Our Sun is a lone wolf of a star, but out there in the wider Universe, stars are often locked in a dance with others, orbiting a mutual centre of gravity. In one such triple-star system, astronomers have just found an exoplanet. It has the rather catchy name LTT 1445Ab, as it orbits the primary
Ever since humanity split into dog and cat people, we’ve been arguing over which one of our beloved companions is a smarter species. A study from 2017 mightn’t be the last word on the matter, but for those who think more neurons means more intelligence, it looks as if dogs stand out among carnivores for
LightSail 2 has successfully deployed its solar sails. Shortly after 12:00 pm PST (19:00 UTC) The Planetary Society tweeted that the sails were deployed, and that the spacecraft was sailing with sunlight. We can all enjoy their success and start to wonder how solar sails will fit into humanity’s plans for space exploration. SAIL DEPLOYMENT
Just 7,800 light-years from Earth, two dead stars have been discovered orbiting each other at record-breaking speeds. So close is their orbit, that astronomers expect to detect gravitational waves from this pair in a matter of years, when we turn on more sensitive tools. We’re used to things on cosmic scales happening pretty slowly, but
As far back as our collective memory extends, we’ve been mesmerised by the dance of the planets across our skies. Even now, despite all our knowledge and technology, their basic movements can still surprise and captivate us. The waltz between Earth and Venus around the Sun has been doing just that, for centuries – and
A team of researchers at the University of California says that there could be way more ice water on the surface of the Moon than previously believed – and that could be a huge deal for future missions to the Moon. By comparing shaded areas that are protected from the Sun on the surface of
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