Science

Science

The Ariane 64 flew with an extended payload shroud to fit all 32 Amazon Leo satellites. Combined, the payload totaled around 20 metric tons, or about 44,000 pounds, according to Arianespace. This is close to maxing out the Ariane 64's lift capability. Amazon has booked more than 100 missions across four launch providers to populate the company's planned fleet of more than 3,200 satellites. With Thursday's launch, Amazon has launched 214 production satellites on eight missions with United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and now Arianespace.

After years of dismissing Earth's neighbor as a "distraction," the SpaceX CEO announced on X that the company has officially shifted its primary focus toward building a "self-growing city" on the moon. While Mars remains the ultimate goal, Musk now argues that the lunar surface offers a much faster "backup" for human consciousness. Musk pointed out that while the stars must align every 26 months for a six-month trek to Mars, the moon is available every 10 days and is only a 48-hour commute away.

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, does not often post on the social media site owned by his rival Elon Musk. But on Monday, Bezos did, sharing on X a black and white image of a turtle emerging from the shadows. The photo, which included no text, may have stumped some observers. Yet for anyone familiar with Bezos' privately owned space company, Blue Origin, the message was clear.

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur reached orbit on February 12 despite "a significant performance anomaly" that saw one of its four solid rocket boosters burn through its nozzle during ascent. Viewers of the launch from Cape Canaveral at 0422 EST (0922 UTC) were treated to some impressive fireworks as the part detached in a shower of fragments. It was the fourth launch of ULA's replacement for the Atlas V and Delta IV rocket, and the second in which an anomaly was noted with the booster.

On an empty beach at the bottom of the world, the waves that roll over the sand are midnight blue and lit by the stars and a waxing moon. I'm only vaguely familiar with the constellations that hang above Great Barrier Island, known for centuries to the Māori as Aotea, some 56 nautical miles northeast of Auckland, New Zealand. I'm not all that used to seeing them so clearly,

There is a profound, quiet magic in standing alone under a truly dark sky, but the experience becomes something else entirely when shared with a community of fellow explorers. Star parties are the heartbeat of this experience: communal, high-energy gatherings where everyone from veteran astronomers to total beginners can share a wide-angle view of the cosmos. It's a chance to level up your astrophotography skills, learn the latest in deep-space science from experts,

During viral infection and in the case of cancer, CD4+ helper T-cells release cytokines, or small signaling proteins, that activate and "give permission" to other immune cells to control and clear viral pathogens. In certain viral infections, such as lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV), which is spread by infected rodents, CD4+ T-cells differentiate into different subpopulations, including one subset of progenitor CD4+ T-cells that replenish type 1 helper (Th1) and follicular helper (Tfh) T-cells.

Hosted at the Royal Institution, the lion, which died of old age and was then donated to science, will be dissected to demonstrate how animal biology works. Medical and veterinary students will be used to seeing such demonstrations, but doing the same for the voyuristic public might not seem very scientific, but it certainly does tick the classic idea of public demonstrations of science to educate the curious.

'They save up ice like a savings account and then spend it all very quickly like a Black Friday event.'

"Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you," CEO Elon Musk proclaimed yesterday following a restructuring that saw a stream of former executives exit the AI lab. This is an interesting recruitment strategy after the company's merger with Musk's rocket maker, SpaceX, and the combined company's anticipated IPO. You might think that xAI employees ought to be fascinated with achieving AGI, using deep learning models to disrupt traditional software companies, or simply bad wordplay like "Macrohard."

The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to the General Electric Company's most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis. Her forte is experimentation; his is scientific theory. We follow their partnership as they successfully find ways to build a better lightbulb, but Langmuir stumbles with an off-the-wall theory of matter.

Stefanovic found that Starlink carried data more quickly than connections that started on European cellular networks, despite the space broadband service often requiring more network hops and not using Tier 1 networks. She hypothesized that Starlink's performance can be attributed to the satellite-to-satellite laser connections SpaceX employs, which route traffic across the satellite network so it can reach the most appropriate terrestrial egress point. That laser network, she suggested, should perhaps be considered a new routing layer for the internet.

Pad 40 has been the primary Falcon 9 launch site for most of the rocket's history, while Pad 39A provided a location for crew launches and an augmentation to support SpaceX's growing launch cadence. But there are signs the Falcon 9 launch cadence, which reached 165 missions last year, may be peaking as the company turns its attention to Starship. And SpaceX has steadily reduced the time it takes to reconfigure Pad 40 between launches, cutting the turnaround time to less than 48 hours.

A bright star in a nearby galaxy has essentially vanished. Astronomers believe that it died and collapsed in on itself, transforming into the eerie cosmic phenomenon known as a black hole. "It used to be one of the brightest stars in the Andromeda galaxy," says Kishalay De, an astronomer with Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute. "Today, it is nowhere to be seen, even with the most sensitive telescopes."

Recently, two unexpected examples by a wild wolf and a domesticated cow named Veronika attracted global attention and once again opened the door for experts and others to weigh in on the question, "Are these really examples of tooling?" Many people are eager to know more about the nitty-gritty details of tooling, so I am thrilled that Dr. Benjamin Beck, an expert in this area, could answer a few questions about this fascinating behavior.

Betley and his colleagues were curious about what happens in the brain as people get stronger through exercise. They decided to focus on the ventromedial hypothalamus, a brain region that regulates appetite and blood sugar. The team then zeroed in on a group of neurons in that region that produce a protein called steroidogenic factor 1 (SF1), which is known to play a part in regulating metabolism. A previous study found that the deletion of the gene that codes for SF1 impairs endurance in mice.

It looks like ordinary paint, but a new coating called Lilypad Paint has a hidden ability to pull moisture out of the air. It works like a dehumidifier, without the energy use. If it's on the wall in your bathroom, it can suck water vapor out of the air after you've taken a shower. The paint holds the humidity in nano-size pores, and then slowly releases it as humidity levels fall in the room.

Perhaps the most commonly told myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. The blueprint for it goes something like this. Once upon a time in history, someone with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field that's new to them for the first time. Upon considering the field's issues, they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before.

Some deep-sea fish may be able to see light in a different way from most other vertebrates, according to a new study. The fish, found in the Red Sea, have what the scientists behind the new study describe as hybrid photoreceptorslight-sensing cells in the retina that combine elements of two distinct kinds of photoreceptors, cones and rods. In human retinas, cone cells enable us to see in bright environments, detecting color and fine detail,

An international group of scientists wants to build a 492ft-tall (150m), 50-mile-long (80km) wall running along the seabed 2,132ft (650m) beneath the surface. Dubbed the Seabed Curtain, scientists claim this ambitious project could halt the Doomsday Glacier's retreat and avert the devastating consequences of global warming. The Doomsday Glacier is a vast, slow-moving river of ice roughly the size of the UK that traps enough fresh water to raise sea levels a staggering 2.1ft (65cm).

The list of feats Andrew Schulz has witnessed an elephant perform with its trunk is as long as, well, an elephant's trunk. These powerful proboscises are strong enough to push over 900 pound trees and gentle enough to pick up a tortilla chip without breaking it. They can snuffle along the ground to sense vibrations from far-off herd movements. They can be used to solve puzzles, peel bananas, craft tools, console a fellow pachyderm or a human friend.

An elephant's trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like peanuts or a tortilla chip. That's because the trunk is highly sensitive when it comes to sensing touch. Scientists have determined that the whiskers lining the trunk are crucial for that sensitivity thanks to their unique structure, amounting to a kind of innate "material intelligence, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

In the run-up to this year's Winter Olympics, and even as the Games have got underway, a scandal has been brewing: allegedly, some competitive ski jumpers may have artificially enlarged their crotch area by injecting their genitals with engorging chemicals or stuffing their underwear to create bigger bulges. The apparent reason: to alter their suit measurementsski jumpsuits are precisely tailored to jumpers' bodiesand, reportedly, to gain a boost in jumps. The allegations, first reported by a German media outlet and since dubbed Penisgate, have caught not only the Internet's attention but also the World Anti-Doping Agency's eye, although no athletes have been implicated by name.

The oldest known pieces of sewn clothing have been discovered in a cave in Oregon, potentially rewriting all of human history. Researchers from the US uncovered pieces of animal hide stitched together from the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago. That would mean that humans in North America had advanced skills, specifically for working with plants, animals, and wood, thousands of years before the Great Pyramid of Egypt was constructed.

N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) are glutamate-gated ion channels that mediate excitatory neurotransmission throughout the brain1. As obligate heterotetramers, their activation requires the binding of both glycine and glutamate2. Although recent structural studies have provided insights into endogenous receptors from select brain regions3, most previous work has relied on recombinant receptors and engineered constructs, which limits our understanding of native NMDARs across the whole brain.

"For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years," Musk wrote on X. "The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars." "The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster," Musk added.

Sampson mines 30 years of data on more than 1,000 Chicagoans born in the 1980s and '90s. The youngest cohort, born in the mid-1990s, came of age amid declining rates of violence, incarceration, and even lead exposure. Those in this younger sample proved far less likely to be arrested than the study's oldest participants, those born in the early to mid-1980s. The youngest were also less likely to use a firearm or witness gun violence.

Enzymatic inhibitors are indispensable tools for dissecting biological pathways and developing therapeutic interventions1. They are broadly categorized by their binding sites and mechanisms of action. Among these, orthosteric inhibitors, which bind to the catalytic site and directly compete with substrates, have been extensively explored due to their predictable structure-activity relationships. However, such inhibitors are typically substrate-agnostic, as their mechanism relies solely on blocking the active site.

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as a material for LEDs owing to exceptional luminescent properties and cost-effective solution processability4,5,6,7,8,9,10. Quasi-2D PeLEDs have demonstrated superior device performance and reproducibility because of their quantum well structures9,11,12,13,14,15,16. However, quasi-2D perovskites are usually composed of hybrid and random 3D-2D phases and face two critical challenges: (1) abundant surface defects will lead to severe non-radiative recombination7,17,18,19 and (2) notable energy disorder will interrupt charge transport, hence reducing device efficiency20,21.