Science

Science

Imagine there's a large, flat sheet of ice out in front of you, and someone unceremoniously shoves you across it at a high speed. What are you to do? If you're wearing conventional shoes, without crampons or blades attached to them, you're going to have a difficult time. Ice is a very low-friction surface, and there's very little you're going to be able to do to change your momentum without slipping and perhaps falling down.

The discovery represents a significant find in the study of the deep ocean, the largest ecosystem on the planet but one that is inhospitable to humans and remains largely unexplored. During a 2023 expedition aboard the E/V Nautilus, scientists using the remotely operated vehicle Hercules spotted a fragment of sunken wood resting off the remote Johnston Atoll. As they drew closer, they found a thriving community that included a large population of strange limpets - oval, pale, and thick-shelled, with a distinctive arched profile.

"This is a lot of shaking for the people in the San Ramon area to deal with," Sarah Minson, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Science Center at California's Moffett Field, told SFGATE. "It's quite understandable that this can be incredibly scary and emotionally impactful, even if it's not likely to be physically damaging or related to any sort of threat of a larger magnitude earthquake."

In laboratory experiments, early-stage human embryos donated from couples after IVF treatment successfully implanted into the engineered lining and began to churn out key compounds, such as the hormone that results in a blue line on positive pregnancy tests. The approach allowed scientists to eavesdrop on the chemical chatter that arises between the embryo and the womb lining as it embeds and begins to be nourished in the first weeks of gestation.

Imagine a healthy forest, home to a variety of species: Birds are flitting between tree branches, salamanders are sliding through leaf litter, and wolves are tracking the scent of deer through the understory. Each of these animals has a role in the forest, and most ecologists would argue that losing any one of these species would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole.

This Hubble image features a trio of galaxies that appear to be very close together, but appearances can be deceiving. The large spiral galaxy at the bottom right is NGC 1356. The two apparently smaller spiral galaxies flanking it are LEDA 467699 ( top) and LEDA 95415 ( left).

Meteorologists and their weather models have not come to any agreement about whether Tuesday's incoming storm will meet the criteria of a "bomb cyclone," but suffice it to say it will be really windy and wet. There is a huge area of low pressure out over the Pacific Ocean, carrying with it wind, rain, and potential thunderstorms, and it is scheduled to hit the Northern California coast with a vengence by 7 pm.

I spent the early years of my PhD at an Austrian non-academic research institute, where competing for grants was the only way that my colleagues and I could secure funding for our research. Everything else we did, from publishing papers to presenting at conferences, felt designed, ultimately, to help secure the next grant. The system seemed back to front: surely it should be about the science first?

A hot spring in Yellowstone national park that erupts sporadically was captured on an official camera exploding in spectacular muddy plumes at the weekend. Volcanic experts at the US Geological Survey described the eruption as simply Kablooey! The tumult occurred at the Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone on Saturday morning and provided dramatic footage. Video shared by the USGS on social media shows mud spraying up and out from the murky hot spring just before 9.23am local time in Biscuit Basin.

A tawny owl screeches nearby in the dark and her mate replies, hooting eerily from the forest below. A white dome floats in the gloaming above a plain black doorway outlined with red light, like a portal to another dimension. I'm in Grizedale Forest, far from any light-polluting cities, to visit the Lake District's first public observatory and planetarium, which opened in May.

"The lapse \"resulted in NIST UTC [universal coordinated time] being 4.8 microseconds slower than it should have been,\" NIST spokesperson Rebecca Jacobson said in an email. That's just under 5 millionths of a second. To understand just how brief an instant that is, Jacobson noted that it takes a person about 350,000 microseconds to blink."

Cody Stylianou thought he saw a huge trout. But, skimming just below the surface, it was moving differently than a fish would. The creature surfaced and, amazed, the Victorian fisher reached for his phone. Swimming in front of him was a pink platypus. Stylianou regularly fishes in the Gippsland spot, which he is keeping secret to protect the rare animal. He thinks it could be the same one he saw years ago, just older and bigger.

The, the degree to which Starshipis a revolutionary technology is not well understood in the world. "It's the first time that there's been any rocket design, where full rapid reusability is possible - well, full reusability at all is possible, or full reusability at all is possible," Musk's word salad continued. "This is the first design where a reusable rocket is one of the possible - with success - is one of the possible outcomes."

With the use of a bootstrap experimental setup consisting of a large polystyrene ball, a curved computer monitor, and a small straw that dispenses sugar water, Tóth managed to teach a rat how to play the classic 1994 video game Doom II. The rat's movements translated into rotations of the ball, which were then translated into movement inside the iconic first-person shooter. The sugar water served as a treat whenever the rat completed a milestone, like walking down a corridor.

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception. The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun

Military weapons are often introduced with bold promises like greater efficiency, revolutionary design, and battlefield dominance on paper. But war has a way of stripping those promises down to their essentials. When weapons leave testing ranges and enter real combat, factors like dirt, stress, logistics, and human error quickly expose weaknesses that no specification sheet can predict, or any human for that matter. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a look at some of these weapons that did not hold up under the pressures of combat.

The roughly Jupiter-mass object, designated PSR J2322-2650b, orbits just one million miles away from its star, or one percent of the Earth's distance from the Sun, with a single "year" lasting just 7.8 Earth hours. And at such proximity, the extreme gravity of the star - an exotic type known as a pulsar - pulls the entire planet into an oblong shape, like a lemon or a football.

In the days leading up to the winter solstice, amber streetlights switch on ever earlier as dusk falls over Flagstaff, Ariz., casting the city in a soft, warm hue. Longer nights mean even more time to spend under hundreds of stars and the cloudy swath of the Milky Way galaxy, which are visible even from the city's downtown. Spectacular views of the night sky are a given for the more than 77,000 residents of the world's first and largest dark sky city,

In 1978, NASA researcher Donald Kessler and his colleagues published a paper titled "Collision frequency of artificial satellites: The creation of a debris belt." The paper laid down a grim warning: a single collision between satellites that would escalate into a series of followup accidents, "each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth." "Under certain conditions, the belt could begin to form within this century and could be a significant problem during the next century," the prescient paper warned.

The culprits are meteorites, or as the Indigenous Moqoit (Mocovi) people call them, gifts from the sky. The Piguem N'onaxa (Campo del Cielo, or Field of the Sky) Reserve is a provincial park in the town of Gancedo, Chaco. It is a protected area within a larger zone where, more than 4,000 years ago, a giant meteor, believed to have weighed about 800 tons roughly the weight of five blue whales fell.

On a grey day in early June, a commercial plane landed at Norfolk Island Airport in the South Pacific. Onboard was precious cargo ferried some 1,700km from Sydney: four blue plastic crates with LIVE ANIMALS signs affixed to the outside. Inside were thumbnail-sized snails, hundreds of them, with delicate, keeled shells. The molluscs' arrival was the culmination of an ambitious plan five years in the making: to bring a critically endangered species back from the brink.

Several new rockets made their first flights this year. Blue Origin's New Glenn was the most notable debut, with a successful inaugural launch in January followed by an impressive second flight in November, culminating in the booster's first landing on an offshore platform. Second on the list is China's Zhuque-3, a partially reusable methane-fueled rocket developed by the quasi-commercial launch company LandSpace. The medium-lift Zhuque-3 successfully reached orbit on its first flight earlier this month, and its booster narrowly missed landing downrange.

After decades of research and experimentation, quantum is shifting from discovery to deployment, and the coming year will be critical for stepping up delivery on a world‑class quantum network by 2035, according to a research note by BT. Furthermore, said Gabriela Styf Sjoman, the firm's managing director of research and network strategy, the UK's next phase of quantum progress hinges on building quantum-ready and quantum-secure networks.

SpaceX says it has lost control of a Starlink satellite that's now falling back to Earth after suffering an anomaly. The sudden loss of communications, drop in altitude, "venting of the propulsion tank," and "release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects," suggests the anomaly was some kind of explosion. SpaceX says it poses no threat to the crew of the ISS and will burn up in the atmosphere "within weeks."

Offshore wind farms may do more than boost renewable energy: they might support marine ecosystems, too. That's the takeaway of a new study conducted in China. The researchers found that wind turbines provided support for colonies of oysters and barnacles and that fish species and biomass were more abundant near the turbines than they were in an area without the machines.

"Engineers at [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] meticulously plan each day of the rover's activities on Mars,"