In 1960, legendary physicist Freeman Dyson published his seminal paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,” wherein he proposed that there could be extraterrestrial civilizations so advanced that they could build megastructures large enough to enclose their parent star. He also indicated that these “Dyson Spheres,” as they came to be known, could
For such a lush, verdant paradise, the Amazon rainforest’s soil can be surprisingly barren. Yet mysteriously fertile “dark earth” called terra preta can be found in patches across hundreds of sites, the origins of which have sparked debate among scientists. Now new research from the US and Brazil says ancient Amazonians intentionally enriched areas of
In what could be excused as a dictionary definition of futility, scientists have tried to teach a species of boxed jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) a few simple tricks to test whether learning necessitates a brain. Don’t expect to see ‘The Amazing Ball-Juggling Cnidarians and Friends’ variety hour on your next trip to Seaworld. This isn’t a
If you saw grains of sand rolling uphill you might be forgiven for thinking you were watching a Christopher Nolan movie. But scientists have recently figured out how a sand-like material can be made to flow back up slopes, without rewinding time. Researchers from Lehigh University in the US engineered tiny particles they call microrollers
A set of mysterious ‘hoofprints’ on the seafloor off the coast of New Zealand are not actually the work of a mythic underwater horse trotting through the abyss. As it turns out, there’s a more scientific explanation than that – one that helps reveal some of the more elusive characters living in the ocean’s depths.
There’s a line of thinking that says you can mentally manifest your way to financial success through believing it will happen – but this kind of aspirational mind trick is actually more likely to be linked to risky investments and bankruptcy, new research has found. Across three studies and a total of 1,023 participants from
The boundaries of science are constantly being pushed and expanded as newer and more advanced technology is developed, and researchers are now promising a “new era” of discovery as the world’s most powerful X-ray laser comes online. The laser in question is the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) II, and it’s able to produce up
When the largest stars in the Universe run out of fuel, they detonate as supernovae, collapsing inward and leaving behind a neutron star, black hole, or just wholly vaporizing. What’s happening inside the unfolding explosion is difficult to understand, and especially so for so-called exotic supernovae, the rarest and brightest types of stellar explosions. To
The fossilized skull of a 455-million-year-old fish reveals an anatomy that’s completely new to the study of vertebrates, bridging a knowledge gap of 100 million years. Insights gained from studying the Ordovician jawless fish, Eriptychius americanus, suggest the early development of the vertebrate brain’s protective dome was more complex than scientists thought. “This fills a
We can’t understand nature without understanding its range. That’s apparent in exoplanet science and in our theories of planetary formation. Nature’s outliers and oddballs put pressure on our models and motivate scientists to dig deeper. Gliese 367 b (or Tahay) is certainly an oddball. It’s an Ultrashort Period (USP) planet that orbits its star in
For centuries, inventor, scholar, and artist Leonardo da Vinci has been lauded for his precise, well-proportioned drawings and imaginative designs. He grasped gravity’s similarity to acceleration a century before Newton, and his artworks were sheer genius in their perspective and geometry. But on closer inspection, it seems one of the rules da Vinci devised to
Virtually every animal on Earth can thank their mother for the energy that fuels each of their cells. The power is generated in a part of the cell known as the mitochondria, and this organelle is made entirely from a genetic recipe laid out in your mother’s DNA. A father’s mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, plays
We may have to rethink our plans for tapping into reserves of water on the Moon. According to a new analysis of lunar craters, these pocks and divots that mar and characterize the lunar surface are too young for the long-term retention of ancient reservoirs of water ice. In fact, most of the craters that
Generative AI – which encompasses large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT but also image and video generators like DALL·E 2 – supercharges what has come to be known as “digital necromancy“, the conjuring of the dead from the digital traces they leave behind. Debates around digital necromancy were first sparked in the 2010s by advances
Neolithic humans were apparently big on reuse. According to an analysis of bones from Cueva de los Marmoles, or Marmoles Cave in Southern Spain, it wasn’t necessarily uncommon for living humans to repurpose the deceased, and recycle their bones into tools. Amongst a collection of bones dating back thousands of years ago, archaeologists led by
A pair of interlocking logs that haven’t seen sunlight in half a million years could challenge some fundamental assumptions about the technology and culture of our Stone Age ancestors. Uncovered in 2019 at the Kalambo Falls in Zambia, the objects provide archaeologists with an exceptionally rare look at wooden technology from mid-Paleolithic Africa, a time
A flawless new image from NASA using a clever mix of photographs from two different cameras has captured a crater on the Moon that has not seen the light of day for billions of years. The ancient pockmark, known as Shackleton Crater, is located in a mountainous part of the lunar south pole, where, due
Engineers working with the European Space Agency have developed a new thruster design smaller than the tip of your finger. Despite its small size, this mini-thruster designed for CubeSats appears to be highly efficient without the use of toxic chemicals. Called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster), it allows CubeSats to maneuver without
It takes a few things to make a diamond. First, you need carbon. Then you need a bunch of pressure and heat deep below the crust. And time – up to billions of years of it – for nature to do its job and then cough them up somewhere close to the planet’s surface. That’s
When the ancient supercontinent Gondwana was torn asunder 83 million years ago, a huge chunk of it sank beneath the waves as it drifted away. According to some geologists, this submerged chunk – called Zealandia – would be considered Earth’s 8th continent, it weren’t for a thick layer of ocean water obscuring our view. Instead,
Over 70 million years ago, dinosaurs lumbered through a wintry landscape in what is now Alaska. At the time, the Prince Creek Formation (PCF) was above the Arctic Circle and would’ve had constant darkness for four straight months. The below-freezing temperatures and occasional snowfall were inhospitable to many, but it seemed to suit a tiny
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew right through a massive solar eruption and caught the whole thing on camera. It’s the first up-close footage ever captured of a solar explosion like this. The video, released by scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, features an especially powerful coronal mass ejection that took place last year. CMEs
Magnificent as they are, most fossils are rather monochromatic, prompting paleontologists to go to great lengths to infer what color those ancient organisms might have been. Some exceptional fossils have preserved the pigment molecules in dinosaur feathers and scaly skin. But given the millions of years that separate us from the lives of those ancient
The building blocks of our brain cells may have begun to form back when our ancestors were still a blobby collection of animal cells oozing through the ocean’s shallows. Researchers from Spain and Germany have discovered characteristics of specialized secretory cells in simple animals called placozoans which could identify them as a prelude to neurons
A new measurement of the Universe has confirmed dark energy makes up close to 69 percent of the sum of everything. That leaves the remaining 31 percent to matter; both of the normal variety – that’s the particles and forces making up everything we can see – and dark matter, the mysterious gravitational poltergeist responsible
A shadowy form of light within a universe of hypothetical particles is getting some serious consideration as a means of discovering the identity of dark matter. According to a comprehensive new analysis under quantum chromodynamics, the dark photon is a much better fit for the observed results of particle collider experiments than the standard model
On Earth, continents are likely necessary to support life. Continents ‘float’ on top of the Earth’s viscous mantle, and heat from the planet’s core keeps the mantle from solidifying and locking the continents into place. The core is hot because of the presence of radioactive elements that came from neutron star collisions. It should be
From the oxygen-carrying corpuscles in our blood to the branching neurons that govern our thoughts, our body is built of a dazzling variety of cells. Researchers from institutions in Germany, Canada, Spain, and the US have published a comprehensive study of how many individual cells of each type there are in typical bodies. Based on
Marine heatwaves may last longer and be more intense in deeper water, potentially threatening sensitive species as climate change makes the extreme events more frequent, researchers said on Monday. Oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat produced by the carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age. Marine heatwaves
Quantum behavior is a strange, fragile thing that hovers on the edge of reality, between a world of possibility and a Universe of absolutes. In that mathematical haze lies the potential of quantum computing; the promise of devices that could quickly solve algorithms that would take classic computers too long to process. For now, quantum
One of the most mysterious stars in the Milky Way might soon have an explanation for its odd behavior. It’s called Boyajian’s Star, or KIC 8462852 – less formally known as Tabby’s Star, a yellow-white glimmer some 1,470 light-years away – and its strange short-term brightness fluctuations and longer-term changes have so far defied scientists’
Like the comet striking the dinosaurs – in slower motion, but just as deadly – human activity is hacking off entire branches from the tree of life, a new study confirms. “It is changing the trajectory of evolution globally and destroying the conditions that make human life possible,” ecologists warn in their new paper. “It
A huge invisible mass could be the reason the Milky Way’s disk is warped and twisted. A new study shows that a tilted, misaligned dark halo – the large blob of dark matter that wraps around and permeates our home galaxy – is the only explanation to date that explains all the features of the
We know there’s ice on the Moon – what’s less clear is where it came from. A new study suggests that waves of electrons, arriving indirectly from Earth and the Sun, are contributing to the formation of frozen water on the lunar surface. These electrons hit the Moon as it passes in and out of
Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving you with an spooky sense of pastness. But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system. Our research
Every once in a while, a high reading of radioactivity off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, sends the US government scrambling to look for a nuclear weapon that’s likely hidden 13 to 55 feet below the ocean and sand, buried in the seafloor. On February 5, 1958, two Air Force jets collided in mid-air
Dinosaurs have a reputation for being the most terrifying prehistoric predators, but a newly discovered skull sheds light on a fearsome beast that dominated 40 million years before the first ‘terrible lizards’ walked the Earth. The 265-million-year-old fossil found in Brazil reveals the largest meat eater of its time, one that prowled the jungles searching
The traditional porcelain and ceramic toilet bowls could be on the way out, if a new 3D-printed design from scientists at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China catches on – with the key benefit being the ultra slippery surface. Poop that clings to the toilet bowl is not only unpleasant for bathroom
Imagine living in a cool, green city flush with parks and threaded with footpaths, bike lanes, and buses, which ferry people to shops, schools, and service centers in a matter of minutes. That breezy dream is the epitome of urban planning, encapsulated in the idea of the 15-minute city, where all basic needs and services
Seen through a giant’s eyes, our Universe’s galaxies cling like foam to the surface of an eternal ocean, drawing into clumps and strings around inky voids. This sparkling web has taken eons to come together, congealing gradually under gravity’s guidance out of what was, billions of years ago, an evenly-spread fog of white-hot particles fresh
If you looked up 66 million years ago you might have seen, for a split second, a bright light as a mountain-sized asteroid burned through the atmosphere and smashed into Earth. It was springtime and the literal end of an era, the Mesozoic. If you somehow survived the initial impact, you would have witnessed the
Neutrinos, the tricky little particles that just stream through the Universe like it’s virtually nothing, may actually interact with light after all. According to new calculations, interactions between neutrinos and photons can take place in powerful magnetic fields that can be found in the plasma wrapped around stars. It’s a discovery that could help us
An experiment that took place on Mars has shown that it’s feasible to extract breathable oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere. From its little home in the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover, the briefcase-sized Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment (MOXIE) has been repeatedly breaking apart molecules in Mars air to generate a small,
The curvature of space-time around a colossal mass has yielded the most detailed measurement of the cosmic distribution of dark matter yet. Aided by a gravitational lens, a team led by cosmologist Kaiki Taro Inoue of Kindai University in Japan has mapped the mysterious form of matter on the smallest scale we’ve ever seen, with
For eons, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) has served as a sort of instruction manual for life, providing not just templates for a vast array of chemical structures but a means of managing their production. In recent years engineers have explored a subtly new role for the molecule’s unique capabilities, as the basis for a biological computer.
For the past 24,000 years or so, a hidden sanctuary of Paleolithic rock art has endured on the walls of a cave near Valencia in eastern Spain, holding clues about the ancient artists and the world they inhabited. The cave itself is well-known to locals and spelunkers yet more than 110 paintings and engravings went
A close look at a mix of old and newly discovered fossils indicates that an ancient species of photosynthesizing bacterium was among the first of its kind to make its home on dry land more than 400 million years ago. Characteristics of a microbe named Langiella scourfieldii place it into a category of cyanobacteria that
Former political leaders and heads of international organisations called Thursday for national moratoriums on deploying technologies to slow global warming by dimming the impact of the Sun. The Climate Overshoot Commission said research and experiments into so-called solar radiation modification (SRM) should move forward, but only under international supervision and in jurisdictions with strong environmental
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