The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA's second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA's sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week.
The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines? Around the same time, in the early 2010s, SpaceX was also trading the economics of reusing the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. Eventually SpaceX founder Elon Musk abandoned his goal of a fully reusable Falcon 9, choosing instead to recover payload fairings and push down manufacturing costs of the upper stage as much as possible.
"Granted, "[p]lants have extensive and well established mechanisms of communication, with that of volatiles being the most well studied and understood," he added. "There is also growing recognition that root exudates play a role in plant-plant interactions, though this is only now being deeply investigated. Nothing else, communication through mychorriza, has withstood independent investigation."
A team of geologists has found for the first time evidence that two ancient, continent-sized, ultrahot structures hidden beneath the Earth have shaped the planet's magnetic field for the past 265 million years. These two masses, known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), are part of the catalog of the planet's most enormous and enigmatic objects. Current estimates calculate that each one is comparable in size to the African continent, although they remain buried at a depth of 2,900 kilometers.
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Tokyo have made a prototype of botanical cement made of desert sand and plant-based additives in hopes that it can be used to build houses and roads. Once mixed, the team adds tiny pieces of wood together and presses them all with heat to produce the cement.
About 45 minutes prior to landing in Honolulu on Dec. 18, 2022, the pilots of Hawaiian Airlines Flight 35, a widebody Airbus A330, saw a white, plume-like cloud swiftly rising vertically ahead of them, caused by a storm cell. Moments later came a hard jolt. Then the airplane dropped rapidly, creating a brief free-falling sensation inside the cabin. Phones, water bottles, blankets and service carts lifted into the air. Passengers were affected as well, with some held down by a seatbelt while others rose upward.
I killed seven houseplants before I discovered the secret: I was literally loving them to death. Every morning, I'd check on them with my watering can in hand, convinced that more water meant more love. Turns out, some plants thrive when you basically ignore them. In fact, there's one particular plant that actually prefers when you forget it exists for weeks at a time.
Real estate with ocean views, stunning mountain vistas, and wide-open green spaces sell at premium prices because humans find those settings pleasing [1-5]. Certain color combinations in fashion-such as brown and forest green-blend harmoniously, while others, such as hot pink and orange, clash. And our eyes like certain proportions in visual objects (like buildings and human faces) but not others.
The boss of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the public body which spends 8bn of taxpayer money each year on research and innovation in the UK, has warned the organisation faces "hard decisions" on funding future projects. In an open letter, Ian Chapman said the government had told it to "focus and do fewer things better", which "will result in negative outcomes for some".
Aspiring Starlink competitor Logos Space Services has secured FCC clearance to launch more than 4,000 broadband satellites into low Earth orbit by 2035, as reported by . Under FCC regulations, the company must deploy half of the approved amount within the next seven years. The company is headed by its founder, Milo Medin, a former project manager at NASA as well as a former vice president of wireless services at Google.
For the study, a team from the Italian Institute of Technology played J.S. Bach's piano compositions for an audience of 49 sleeping newborns. This included 10 original melodies and four shuffled songs with scrambled melodies and pitches. While the babies listened, the researchers used electroencephalography - electrodes placed on their heads - to measure their brainwaves. When the babies showed signs of surprise, it meant they expected the song to go one way, but it went another.
Babies in the womb begin to respond to music by about eight or nine months, as shown by changes in their heart rate and body movements, said Dr Roberta Bianco, the first author of the research who is based at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome. Previous research has also shown that aspects of musical memory can carry over from the womb to birth, she added. However, it was unclear how deeply different aspects of music were processed by such young brains.
Her team's analysis of the residue samples contained beeswax, plant oils, animal fats, bitumen, and resins from coniferous trees such as pines and larches, as well as vanilla-scented coumarin (found in cinnamon and pea plants) and benzoic acid (common in fragrant resins and gums derived from trees and shrubs). The resulting fragrance combined a "strong pine-like woody scent of the confers," per Huber, mixed in with "a sweeter undertone of the beeswax" and "the strong smoky scent of the bitumen."
Analogue quantum simulations are a useful tool for investigating these systems, particularly in regimes in which the applicability of numerical techniques is limited. For different simulator platforms, figures of merit include the electron bandwidth and interaction strength, temperature and the number of simulated lattice sites. Their use is further underscored by the ability to realize distinct lattice geometries, on-site degrees of freedom and by the physical observables that are accessible to experimental measurement.
In fact, Stawicki was on a mission to save the lives of around 1,000 zebrafish ( Danio rerio) in her laboratory. Similarities between lines of hair cells on the fish's flanks and those in the mammalian inner ear enable her to use them as a model to study hearing problems in humans caused by some antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs. A sensor had picked up that the lab's heating system had been knocked out by a power fault.
For years, scientists have viewed cancer as a localized glitch in which cells refuse to stop dividing. But a new study suggests that, in certain organs, tumors actively communicate with the brain to trick it into protecting them. Scientists have long known that nerves grow into some tumors and that tumors containing lots of nerves usually lead to a worse prognosis.
These scraps of continental crust are found in the middle of oceans, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest continent. Scientists have been mystified for decades by how they came to be there; the fragments were even used as an argument against plate tectonics, says Joao Duarte, a geologist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. But a recent study in Nature Geoscience suggests that these misplaced fragments fit just fine within our understanding of plate tectonics and actually
Watching the Winter Olympics is an adrenaline rush as athletes fly down snow-covered ski slopes, luge tracks and over the ice at breakneck speeds and with grace. When the first Olympic Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France, in 1924, all 16 events took place outdoors. The athletes relied on natural snow for ski runs and freezing temperatures for ice rinks.
It might sound like an exaggeration, but it's not: beer played an indirect but crucial role in the birth of modern surgery. Not because it held the key to cures, nor because anyone drank it in an operating room, but because it was one of the first products in which science observed something previously invisible. That something germs would forever change how we understand fermentation, food and also human infections.
Growing up outside Manchester, I spent countless summer holidays at my grandparents' farm in the Yorkshire Dales. My grandfather would step outside each morning, scan the sky, and announce with absolute certainty what the weather would do that day. No smartphone apps, no weather channel, just decades of observation. I used to think it was nonsense. How could watching birds or looking at clouds possibly compete with satellite technology? But here's the thing: he was almost always right.
Exposure to cytosolic DNA triggers innate immune responses through cyclic GMP-AMP (cGAMP) synthase (cGAS)1,2,3. After binding to DNA, cGAS produces cGAMP as a second messenger that binds to stimulator of interferon genes (STING), a signalling adaptor protein anchored to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)3,4,5. STING then traffics from the ER through the Golgi to perinuclear vesicle clusters, which leads to activation of the kinases TBK1 and IKK and subsequent induction of interferons and other cytokines6,7,8,9.
Each time we've looked at the Universe in a fundamentally new way, we didn't just see more of what we already knew what was out there. In addition, those novel capabilities allowed the Universe to surprise us, breaking records, revolutionizing our view of what was out there, and teaching us information that we never could have learned without collecting that key data.
Attia had been prominently showcased as one of three members of Eight Sleep's scientific advisory board, a post he had held since May 14, 2024. His photo no longer appears as part of the panel on the company homepage. Company officials and Attia did not respond to requests for comment. It's not clear exactly when his name and photo were removed, but the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows they were there as recently as January 22.
The scrape of a fork against a plate. The crunch of someone biting into an apple during a meeting. That wet, rhythmic sound of chewing with an open mouth. If reading these descriptions made you physically uncomfortable or even angry, you're not alone. And here's what might surprise you: that visceral reaction to everyday sounds could be a sign of a broader sensory sensitivity that shapes how you experience the entire world around you.
