News

Twelve days after erroneous instructions pushed Voyager 2’s antenna 2 degrees off the line to Earth resulting in NASA losing contact with the spacecraft the first step has been made to restoring communications.  Voyager 2 is now almost 20 billion kilometers from Earth (12.3 billion miles) or 18.4 light-hours. That would make communications dicey under […]

When we look at stars we see them “twinkle” because the atmosphere is in motion. But stars also twinkle on their own accord. Vibrations from the internal motion of the plasma that makes stars ripple through them creating variations on the surface, including variations in their brightness, which appears to make them twinkle. Now astronomers […]

NASA’s Voyager 2 is currently beyond the edge of the Solar System, the second furthest object humanity has ever sent into the cosmos. However, due to a software update that inadvertently pointed its antenna away from Earth, it’s no longer in touch with mission control, hopefully just temporarily. Voyager 2 is now almost 20 billion […]

Small energy storage devices have been made out of materials familiar even to the ancients: cement, water, salt, and carbon black. In the quest to break the world free of fossil fuel dependence, we’re moving faster to produce low-carbon energy than to store it for when it’s needed. As the challenge becomes clear, however, a […]

Jellyfish might be famous for all the wrong reasons: stinging you on holiday and wafting through the ocean resembling a fried egg with no need for a brain or an anus. However, these funky creatures have been floating through Earth’s seas for a long long time and represent one of the earliest branches of diverse […]

A background object in the latest image from JWST is certainly puzzling – and not just metaphorically. It is shaped like a giant question mark. The object is most likely a distant galaxy interacting, resulting in a shape that reminds us of a question mark. The object is a literal smudge below the focus of […]

Painting your house white has been suggested as a way to cool down buildings and cope with heat waves, which are becoming increasingly common during the climate crisis. However, in the 1950s, Americans were being advised that keeping their homes tidy and freshly painted white could increase their chances of survival for an altogether different […]

Our best understanding of the universe tells us that we are only familiar with about 5 percent of everything that there is in the cosmos. That’s the matter and energy that makes us. The remaining 95 percent is invisible to us and yet to be proven experimentally. We call them dark matter and dark energy. […]

Take a look at the smile of an ancient human skull and you’ll notice that their teeth are often remarkably straight (even if a few have gone missing over the centuries). Without braces, fluoride-rich toothpaste, or wisdom tooth extractions, many prehistoric humans managed to maintain the pearly whites of a grinning Hollywood actor. So, how […]

It’s hard to scroll through a news website and not see “ChatGPT” somewhere. Since being publicly released on November 20, 2022, the precocious chatbot has ranked 100 million monthly active users and has skyrocketed in some of Google’s most searched terms.  Despite its popularity, remarkably few people can tell you what the “GPT” in ChatGPT […]

The star HD 140283 has been called the “Methuselah star” for its extreme age. At an estimated over 14 billion years old, it’s the oldest star we know, at least within our galaxy. A star that old is certainly interesting, particularly when it is so close to us it can be seen with binoculars, however, […]

Long before a space rock brought death on an unprecedented scale to the dinosaurs, smaller counterparts seeded the world with the materials to make life. In the 1960s, meteorites were shown to contain some, but not all, of the nucleobases from which DNA and RNA have formed. Now, the finding of the missing nucleobases in […]

Have you ever felt uneasy or freaked out by puppets or human-like models? Perhaps you’ve been agitated by the animatronic characters at theme parks across the world or ruffled by the robots that frequently appear in the news. Muppets, puppets, and dummies can all stir bizarre feelings in us because there is just something that’s […]

Indo-European languages are spoken by almost half of the world’s population, and while dialects as diverse as French and Bengali might seem completely unrelated, it is widely believed that they all share a common ancestor. For centuries, linguists have been arguing over the origins of this group of mother tongues, and researchers have now traced […]

Any fan of true crime shows understands the mystique surrounding psychopaths. It is not clear exactly what the appeal is, but there is certainly something fascinating about otherwise unassuming or charismatic characters – people we may live near, speak to in the office, or sit next to on the train – who turn out to […]

The family of Henrietta Lacks has reportedly reached a historic settlement with a biotech company that allegedly profited from the use of her cells, which were taken from Lacks decades ago without her consent or knowledge.  The legal action started in October 2021 when the living relatives of Henrietta Lacks filed a lawsuit against Thermo […]

Aquarists at Tennessee Aquarium were surprised to discover a new arrival waiting for them when they checked the swell shark tank last month. Swimming between its parents was a new swell shark baby. Also known as “glow sharks” because they glow under ultraviolet light, take a break and watch the little one glow as it […]

We live in paranoid times, it seems. Every day there’s a new claim on the Internet that purports to reveal secret truths, evidence of elaborate cover-ups, or general mass conspiracies that have duped us all. The latest one doing the rounds is the belief that historical footage of nuclear weapons tests is in fact fake. […]

Lunar lovers, this is your month. We are getting two Full Moons in August – a regular and a Blue Moon – and both of them will be particularly close to our planet, getting the appellative “super”. The first Supermoon is going to be tomorrow, August 1, with the following one on August 30, which […]

Some time in the first half of the first century BCE, a mystery individual was buried on a small island off the coast of England along with a unique array of grave goods. It took until 1999 for the body to be discovered, yet the presence of both a sword and a mirror – items […]