Science

Science

When ultra-runners prepare for races that span hundreds of miles and last for days, they are not only challenging their determination and physical power. They are also exploring how far human physiology can be pushed. In a study published October 20 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, researchers reported that even elite endurance athletes cannot consistently exceed an average "metabolic ceiling" equal to 2.5 times their basal metabolic rate (BMR) in daily energy use.

Under a hazy gray sky on the first day of 1995, the Draupner natural gas platform in the North Sea was struck by something that had long been relegated to maritime folklore: an 84-foot wall of water that hurled massive equipment across the deck and warped steel supports. The Draupner wave provided the first hard evidence that rogue waves were very real.

A blast from the Sun kept Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the pad as the Northern Lights forced NASA to halt the launch. It has not been a good week for Jeff Bezos' rocket. A planned launch on November 9 was scrubbed due to weather, and the Blue Origin team had hoped to get the New Glenn off the pad on November 12, but it was not to be. While skywatchers were admiring an aurora, NASA scientists were fretting about the effects of the solar storm.

According to the US Geological Survey, a 3.6M earthquake rumbled just south of Vallejo Thursday afternoon, and miled shaking was felt in San Francisco, the East Bay, and parts of the North Bay. The earthquake appears to have occurred along the Southampton Fault, which appears like a northern extension of the Calaveras Fault a fault running under the East Bay and down to Hollister, just east of the Hayward Fault.

Researchers used what's known as the biobehavioral aging clock framework to quantify biobehavioral age gaps (BBAGs), by using artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on thousands of health and behavioral profiles. These models can predict a person's biological age based on physical markers such as hypertension, diabetes, sleep problems, and sensory loss, as well as protective factors including education, cognition, functional ability, and physical activity.

The U.S. Army is entering a new era of aviation defined by speed and advanced technology. From the upgraded AH-64E Apache Guardian to next-generation systems like the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) and the CH-47F Chinook Block II, the Army's newest aircraft are built to dominate on the battlefield. These are just two of the platforms that the Army is pushing going forward; however, there are still legacy platforms that see the sky with a storied service history.

If a TV programme sets about sequencing the genome of Adolf Hitler the person in modern history who comes closest to a universally agreed-upon personification of evil there are at the very least two questions you want the producers to ask themselves. First: is it possible? And second, the Jurassic Park question: just because scientists can, should they? Channel 4's two-part documentary Hitler's DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator is not the first time the self-consciously edgy British broadcaster has gone there.

Scientists have long speculated what caused the downfall of the Neanderthals, but a new study suggests they never truly went extinct at all. Scientists in Italy and Switzerland claim the ancient group of archaic humans didn't experience a 'true extinction' because their DNA exists in people today. Over as little as 10,000 years, our species, Homo sapeins, mated and produced offspring with Neanderthals as part of a gradual 'genetic assimilation'.

Where does all this dust come from? It's thought to be the result of erosion caused by the winds. Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, dust particles can be difficult to move, but larger particles can become more easily airborne if winds are turbulent enough, later taking smaller dust motes with them. Perseverance and previous Mars rovers have mostly witnessed wind vortices that were associated with either dust devils or convection, during which warm air rises.

IBM's quantum program is hitting all the milestones it's set out in its most recent road map-and it is accelerating progress toward a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, by shifting production of its quantum processors out of its research labs to an 300mm quantum advanced 300mm wafer fabrication facility at the Albany NanoTech Complex. The move will double the speed at which IBM can produce quantum processors, and enable a tenfold increase in their physical complexity.

Space weather forecasters issued an alert on Tuesday for incoming severe solar storms that could produce colorful northern lights and temporarily disrupt communications.In the past few days, the sun has burped out several bursts of energy called coronal mass ejections that could reach Earth Tuesday night and early Wednesday. The potential severe geomagnetic storms could disrupt radio and GPS communications, according to forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Data indicate that geopolitical tensions are affecting how scientists around the world collaborate on research projects. But "rather than uniformly shrinking, global academic networks are being reconfigured", says Marina Zhang, a technology and geopolitics researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia. Collaborations with Israel and Russia, and between China and the United States, are among those seeing such shifts.

For years, astronomers have observed the stars, wondering whether storms as violent as those that shake the Sun could erupt elsewhere in the universe. The Sun often hurls gigantic clouds of plasma into space known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) capable of disrupting space weather, creating dazzling auroras, or rattling the satellites orbiting Earth. But beyond the Sun, no one had ever observed another celestial body doing the same until now.

Asteroid 2024 YR4, a 220-foot (67m) 'city-killer', currently has a four per cent chance of hitting the moon on 22 December 2032. However, fresh observations could mean the odds of a collision rise to as high as 30 per cent. If the massive asteroid does hit the moon, it could carve out a 0.6-mile-wide crater and shower Earth with lunar shrapnel.

From Einstein's spacetime theory to the brain's internal clock, they examine whether time is an external property of the universe or a mental construct. By connecting physics and neuroscience, they unpack the idea that how we experience time may differ entirely from how it actually works. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they're on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking.

Is 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 prime? Before you ask the Internet for an answer, can you consider how you might answer that question without a computer or even a digital calculator? In the 1800s French mathematician Edouard Lucas spent years proving that this 39-digit number was indeed prime. How did he do it? Lucas, who incidentally also designed the entertaining game Tower of Hanoi, developed a method that's still useful today, more than a century later.

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) just published its top 10 categories of application risks for 2025, its first list since 2021. It found that while broken access control remains the top issue, security misconfiguration is a strong second, and software supply chain issues are still prominent. The update was presented at the organization's Global AppSec USA event. The list is final but the official write-up is in preview, according to OWASP Top 10 co-leads Neil Smithline and Tanya Janca.

China is preparing to rescue three astronauts who took refuge in the Tiangong space station after a suspected space-junk strike on their spacecraft last week, Chinese officials said on Tuesday. In a statement, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSE) said engineers have carried out extensive tests on a backup capsule that they plan to use to bring the three men back to Earth.