Science

Science

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American's Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You're listening to our weekly science news roundup. First up, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported last Monday that 2025 is shaping up to be the second-hottest year on record, with data suggesting it will tie with 2023 for runner-up status. To learn more about what this means, we are talking to Andrea Thompson, senior desk editor for life science here at Scientific American. Hi, Andrea.

Even the closest exoplanets are more than 4 light years away (36 trillion miles), which makes it doubtful that we'll ever visit one-so why bother? The reason is, it helps us answer an age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? As far as we understand, you need a planet to have life, and the race is on to locate one with Earth-like qualities.

They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium:

For decades, my colleagues and I advanced the premise that early substance use-nicotine, alcohol, or cannabis (or other addicting drugs)-interferes with critical maturation stages, particularly adolescence. Some questioned the science behind these premises, while others said it was propaganda from people disapproving of drugs like cannabis to justify their views. Despite this, clinicians often conveyed the cautionary: "The adolescent brain is still developing," or "Drugs hurt the teenage brain."

Neal Agarwal published another gift to the internet with Size of Life. It shows the scale of living things, starting with DNA, to hemoglobin, and keeps going up. The scientific illustrations are hand-drawn (without AI) by Julius Csotonyi. Sound & FX by Aleix Ramon and cello music by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga calm the mind and encourage a slow observation of things, but also grow in complexity and weight with the scale. It kind of feels like a meditation exercise.

Uranium is a weakly radioactive metal that is found in many parts of the world in low concentrations. It emits alpha, beta, and gamma particles that can be cancer-causing if exposure is intense and long-lasting enough. At weaker concentrations, it is used for nuclear medicine and other research purposes. The half-life of uranium is extremely long, ranging from 159,200 to 4.5 billion years, depending on the isotope. This makes it useful for dating the age of geologic strata and estimating the age of the Earth.

3I/ATLAS will pass closest to Earth on December 19, 2025,

Negative self-talk was found to have a positive impact and lead to better performance on the second round of the test. This happened possibly because it created a state of heightened attention and internal motivation. People became more alert and focused after criticizing themselves. Positive self-talk was linked to changes in brain connectivity that improved executive functions such as planning, reasoning, and decision-making. However, it also gave rise to a degree of false confidence.

It also spins on its axiscompleting one Mars dayin 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds (to distinguish this period from an Earth day, we call it a sol, referencing the Latin word for the sun). Keeping track of your schedule on Mars would be different than doing so on Earth. But still, at its core, it would just be a matter of conversion.

NDEs occasionally include encounters with deceased individuals whose death was unknown to the experiencer. If NDEs were driven by expectation, accurate perceptions of unknown (and surprising) facts should not occur. Though rare, such experiences are reported with enough regularity to warrant systematic investigation. A new research protocol aims to document such cases with greater rigor than has previously been possible.

When animals cry, moths start licking their chops. The less glamorous relatives of butterflies have been known to use their long proboscis to sip the tears of everything from birds to reptiles to even domestic animals. But the behavior, known as lachryphagy, has been mostly observed in the tropics. Now, for the first time, researchers have documented moths drinking the tears of a moosejust the second time the behavior has been documented outside of the tropics. (The other was observed with a horse in Arkansas.)

With hundreds of lilts and cadences across our small island, the ever-changing sound of an Irish voice isn't a new phenomenon - and, of course, it's always the kids' fault

You can't generate solar power at night unless your panels are in space. A startup that wants to beam orbital sunlight straight into existing solar farms has just emerged from stealth, claiming a world-first power-beaming demo, but with a lot of critical information left unreported. Overview Energy announced on Wednesday that, after three years developing its technology in stealth mode, it managed to get a Cessna Caravan plane to send power to a solar installation on the ground from an altitude of 3 miles

India was due to send its own spacecraft, crewed with its own astronauts, into orbit in 2022. But COVID-19 and a series of technical setbacks have consistently delayed the Gaganyaan mission's progress. ISRO the Indian Space Research Organization has now certified its LMV3 launch rocket for human travel and is aiming to complete three uncrewed launches of the Gaganyaan spacecraft in 2026. If things go to plan, three astronauts (or "Gaganyatris") selected from air force pilots Prasanth Balakrishnan, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Shubhanshui Shukla, will be strapped in for the maiden voyage. The earliest that launch could take place is 2027.

Science is neither a collection of facts nor merely a process, but rather the combination of both. All at once, science is simultaneously the full suite of knowledge that we gain from observing, measuring, and performing experiments that test the Universe, as well as the process through which we perform those investigations and refine our conclusions based on an ever-increasing set of data.

The infamous San Andreas Fault Zone - a system with the main fault and many near-parallel faults - runs across much of California, dividing the Pacific tectonic plate from the North American one. The Pacific plate moves northwest about 2 inches per year, meaning Los Angeles is creeping toward San Francisco. The unsteady sliding between the two plates plays out in fits and starts. Sudden slips lead to earthquakes, which release the pent-up energy.

It's easy to take for granted that with the flick of a lighter or the turn of a furnace knob, modern humans can conjure flames cooking food, lighting candles or warming homes. For much of our history, archaeologists think, early humans could only make use of fire when one started naturally, like when lightning struck a tree. They could gather burning materials, move them and sustain them. But they couldn't start a fire on their own.

Sarah Fortune, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, and her colleagues used drones and camera-equipped tags to study the killer whales over two weeks in August 2020. As they observed, they noticed something strangethe regular presence of Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens). On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing.

Itching arises with local inflammation from an insect bite, allergy, or other irritant. Itch sensations travel along small-diameter, slow neurons to the spinal cord and thence to the brain via the spinothalamic pathway [13]. Any patch of skin that itches also has mechanoreceptors that detect touch and vibration, whose signals make their way to the spinal cord via fast, large-diameter neurons that spinal neurons relay to the brain via a pathway called the dorsal columns [13].

The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration. Data in the Nature Index are updated regularly, with the most recent 12 months made available under a Creative Commons licence at natureindex.com. The database is compiled by Nature Portfolio.

R.G. carried out most of the experimental work and analysis. M.L. designed the study, wrote the first version of the manuscript and performed TEM analysis with F.M. and N.C. F.M. and R.G. created the algorithms to perform DIC and map matching across the various techniques. C.C., G.S. and R.G. performed the AFM work and analysis. O.R. created the nanocrystalline Al alloys.

Please be advised that there is significant solar flare and space weather activity, it read. The company, a maker of tractors and ball caps, isn't the first entity you'd turn to for advice about the sun. But the star's storms were messing with the GPS systems on John Deere's precision agricultural equipment, which uses geographic guidance to help farmers precisely plant, spray and harvest crops.

It's a fabulous weapon. It allows us to transform the world, understand ourselves, ask ourselves what we are All animals have a brain that allows them to survive, but we have done something much more powerful with it: we not only survived, but we have created a culture, a civilization And there's an enormous journey ahead: we might blow ourselves up before then through our own fault, but we have an unparalleled capacity for transformation and understanding