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Last month, NASA announced development progress of the Pulsed Plasma Rocket, a new type of thruster that could help enable one of the coolest astronomy projects ever dreamt up. Advertisement First proposed by Einstein (somewhat reluctantly), the idea is actually fairly simple, and based on a concept we use fairly frequently in astronomy these days […]

On June 20, 2024, the summer solstice will occur at its earliest point in 228 years – but this is just the start. Over the next 72 years, the annual event will get progressively earlier every four years. So what’s going on? Advertisement The summer solstice tends to occur on June 21 every year. This […]

Astronomers have found a pair of quasars in the process of merging during the final periods of Cosmic Dawn, around 900 million years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant (and so, earliest) pair of interacting quasars yet found, and it is also the first one that comes from Cosmic Dawn. Advertisement Cosmic […]

A group of physicists was able to produce a measurement of the Earth’s rotation employing photons – the particles of light – experiencing a peculiar quantum phenomenon called entanglement. This allows them to push the precision of the measurement up 1,000 times, and it could be used to explore questions of fundamental physics. Advertisement You […]

After going extinct in the wild in the 1960s, Przewalski’s horses are now beginning to make a comeback to their native home of the plains of Central Asia. In order to help with conservation efforts, researchers from the University of Minnesota have successfully mapped the entirety of the species’ genome. Advertisement Genomics, the study of […]

Diagrams and animations showing the orbits of the planets are lying to you a little bit. Or to put it more accurately, they are simplifying the orbits of the planets so that teachers don’t have to explain barycenters to children who are still coming to grips with Earth not being the only planet that exists. […]

There are 126 species of birds that have been lost to science according to a new analysis. “Lost” species are defined by not having had a confirmed sighting in at least a decade, but you could help find some of them as researchers are calling on citizen scientists to be their eyes and ears. Advertisement […]

Analysis of data from 4,700 people recovering from a bout of COVID-19 has revealed more insights into who may be most at risk from lingering chronic illness. Referred to as long COVID, scientists are still not clear on exactly what causes the debilitating symptoms – with possibilities numbering into the hundreds – but this new […]

In the whale world, a few species get all the glory; the blue whale is the world’s largest, and then there are humpbacks, leaping out of the ocean to the delight of film crews and tourists. Beluga whales might be famous for their unusual appearance and killer whales for sinking yachts (and not actually being […]

Treatment for depression has historically taken a “one-size-fits-all” approach, but this may be about to change as new research has found six kinds of depression that are identifiable through brain scans. The different kinds, or “biotypes”, respond better to some treatments than others, and could aid us in delivering more effective care for people living […]

A former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told a US cable news network that a bird flu pandemic is “very likely”. Robert Redfield, a virologist who served as director of the agency from 2018 to 2021, also noted that bird flu in humans is associated with “significant mortality”, and that […]

The US looks set to face scorching temperatures this week, as the first significant heatwave of the season gets underway. Much of the Midwest, Great Lakes, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic are forecast to see potentially record-breaking heat lingering throughout the first half of the week. The longevity of the extreme temperatures expected in some locations has not […]

Once viewed as a surprisingly stable bastion, the South Pole is starting to show some worrying signs of change. Antarctic sea ice reached historically low levels last year and climate change is almost certainly to blame.  Advertisement In 2023, the Antarctic had 2 million square kilometers (772,204 square miles) less ice cover than usual during […]

That hot air rises is one of physics’s most widely known principles. If you live in a house with more than one story you’ve felt how air conditioning can be almost essential for survival upstairs, but a luxury below. Yet the tops of mountains are the first places to get snow; that’s if they’re not […]

Concrete is, to put it mildly, really bad for the environment. It’s the most-consumed product on the planet, outside of water, and its carbon footprint bears that out: on its own, the production of cement and concrete accounts for a whole eight percent of global CO2 emissions, or more than four billion tonnes of the […]

This week, an “alien” signal from Mars received just over a year ago has finally been decoded, with just eight confirmed individuals, polar-grizzly bear hybrids are “extremely rare”, and it turns out a trip to space could (temporarily) reverse aging. Finally, we meet (literally) the enormous and stinky corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanium. Advertisement Subscribe to […]

It’s been over four years since COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, and despite best efforts, the virus that causes it is still very much kicking about. That’s in large part thanks to it evolving into multiple different variants, the latest of which has been dubbed KP.3. Advertisement KP.3 is one of the FLiRT variants of […]

On a recent aerial survey off the New England coast, researchers from NOAA Fisheries made 161 whale sightings in a single day, a vast proportion of which were of the rare and endangered sei whale. Advertisement The flight took place on May 25 and saw the team cover an area south of Martha’s Vineyard and […]

With the cost of living rising, many people are switching up their supermarket habits in order to save money, particularly when it comes to vegetables. Frozen veg is often on the cheaper side, but some might believe that fresh is inherently “better” for you – so which really packs more of a nutritional punch? Advertisement […]