Science

Science

The same optic fibers that pulse with the world's Internet traffic are now listening to the pulse of the planet, picking up earthquake tremors in better detail than traditional seismic networks do. In a recent Science study, researchers used 15 kilometers of telecom fiber near Mendocino, Calif., to record the region's biggest earthquake in five yearscapturing in fine detail how the magnitude 7 rupture started, slowed and sped up, accelerating even faster than the speed of sound.

If you're on the surface of Earthand I'm betting you arethere are many ways to reliably estimate the distance to some object. One we use almost subconsciously is to compare an object's apparent size with how big we know it to be. For example, you have a good feel for the size of, say, a typical human. So if you see someone looming large in your vision, you can reckon they're nearby, whereas if they appear very small, they must be much farther away.

Astronomers have found what could become the first target for a crucial test of NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a soon-to-launch observatory that serves as a pathfinder mission for discovering Earthlike worlds around other stars. In a pair of new studies, an international research team has revealed two newfound objects around nearby stars: a gas-giant exoplanet orbiting the star HIP 54515 and a brown dwarf around the star HIP 71618.

The US must return astronauts to the Moon before China mounts its first crewed landing there, NASA administrator nominee Jared Isaacman predicted on Wednesday.

China is redrawing the global science map, according to an analysis of citation data by the analytics firm Clarivate. The country is increasing research collaborations with European partners, even as it expands into emerging areas from southeast Asia to the Middle East and Africa. The United States, meanwhile, is losing its long-held lead as a research powerhouse and collaborator in world science.

Though they look still on the surface, millions of optical and radar satellite images collected from 2014-2022 reveal that the rate of each glacier's flow depends on the season and geographic location. In Arctic regions of Russia and Europe, for instance, glaciers typically reach top speeds during summer or early fall, while in Alaska, they accelerate the most during spring.

Dyer told Space.com that solar radiation on the day of the flight was within normal levels and far too low to affect the aircraft. '[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,' Dyer said. 'They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0, messing up information and making things go wrong. 'They can even induce hardware failures when they generate a current in an electronic device and burn it out.'

The book is a history of carbon dioxide's complicated and vital role in shaping life on Earth, told across many millions of years. It is only during the very last bit of that span when humans had the chance to start messing around with everything, and while we talked about that part, a lot of this first segment was spent with Drew and I asking Peter very basic questions about carbon dioxide, and him giving very interesting and detailed answers.

Using some of the world's most powerful telescopes, a team of researchers found more than 280 galaxies stretched in a line through the cosmos. These galaxies are studded throughout a vast filament of gas and dark matter, which is turning on its central axis like a giant cosmic 'rolling pin'. The researchers say that this filament, and the hundreds of galaxies inside it, is spinning at speeds over 246,000 miles per hour (396,000 km/s).

Scientists have identified a protein that may be key to proper sperm formation. Without it, male mice produced no viable sperm, they found. A team at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan found that a protein called Poc5 appears critical to the development of sperm's tailthe vital part that helps them swim toward an egg in order to fertilize it.

Day 4 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: Star Birth in the Lobster Nebula. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged a region where the radiation and winds from a group of superhot infant stars are blasting and sculpting dense clouds of surrounding dust.

Then the proboscis/nozzle was aligned with the outlet of the plastic tip. Finally, the proboscis and the tip were bonded with UV-curable resin. The necroprinter achieved a resolution ranging from 18 to 22 microns, which was two times smaller than the printers using the smallest commercially available metal dispensing tips. The first print tests included honeycomb structures measuring 600 microns, a microscale maple leaf, and scaffolds for cells.

It could also be the time he led an expedition in the Canadian high Arctic, battling unforgiving ice to locate a lost British vessel crushed by those same elements. Or, when diving in waters off the Florida Keys humming with history, he passed a pod of lobsters clustered in a reef that was composed entirely of 16th-century silver bars from a Spanish galleon.

The clear divergence in approaches to public research funding in the East and West is laid bare in the first Nature Index ranking for applied sciences. China dominates the ranking and other Asian countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, boast an outsized performance in the field for the scale of their overall research output. It's a different story for many Western countries, however, which have a relatively small Nature Index output in the applied sciences.

Here, using an optimized 3D suspension culture system, we have successfully advanced the in vitro culture of a stem cell-derived monkey blastoid to day 25. Morphological and histological analyses showed that these monkey embryoids underwent gastrulation and largely recapitulated key developmental events of the late gastrulation stage observed in vivo, with the appearance of a neural plate, haematopoietic system, allantois, primitive gut, primordial germ cells, yolk sac structures and progenitors of other organs, excluding trophoblast derivatives.

She imagined colleagues thinking, "Oh, that's the weird one who works on astrocytes," says Goshen, whose laboratory is at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A lot of people were sceptical, she says. But not any more. A rush of studies from labs in many subfields are revealing just how important these cells are in shaping our behaviour, mood and memory. Long thought of as support cells, astrocytes are emerging as key players in health and disease.

Oleg Artemyev is said to have been accused of photographing classified documents and rocket equipment at a SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, California, and then 'smuggling' that information out of the building on his phone in late November. The 54-year-old was scheduled to be part of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission, led by NASA, heading to the International Space Station (ISS) in early 2026.

Kian Sadeghi, the 25-year-old founder and CEO at Nucleus Genomics, believes every parent has a right to do just that, selecting qualities they desire - from height to weight to intelligence. He calls it "genetic optimization," and it's part of a Silicon Valley push to breed "super-babies." Sadeghi dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania and started the company in 2021, inspired by a cousin who died of a rare genetic illness.

Even before this year's Spotify Wrapped dropped, I had a hunch what mine would reveal. Lo and behold, one of my most-listened-to songs was an obscure 2004 track titled " Rusty Chevrolet " by the Irish band Shanneyganock. I heard it first thanks to my son, whose friend had been singing it on the swings at school. My son found it utterly hilarious, and it's been playing in our house nonstop ever since.

Today the globe is circled by thousands of active satelliteseach prone to photobombing astronomers' telescopes as an artificial star zipping across the night sky. Scientists working with ground-based observatories such as the cutting-edge Vera C. Rubin Observatory have long worried about this visual interferencebut as satellites continue to proliferate, space-based telescopes, including the beloved Hubble Space Telescope, are beginning to suffer, too. And the problem is only going to get worse.

Blurry streaks of light created by fast-moving artificial satellites are already known to mar images taken by ground-based observatories. Today, researchers report in Nature that space-based telescopes will not escape such interference as fleets of private satellites proliferate. The researchers found that in the next decade, satellite trails could taint roughly 96% of the images taken by some space-based telescopes, and a single image could contain as many as 92 streaks.

The Jaws Effect is finally wearing off, a promising new study has revealed. Named after the 1975 thriller, the Jaws Effect describes how films featuring sharks fuel a fear of the creatures in the real world. In a new study, researchers from the University of South Australia asked hundreds of people to describe sharks in three words. While 'teeth', 'jaws' and 'predator' were some of the most common answers, the vast majority (66 per cent) of the descriptors were neutral.

Like clockwork, there are a series of celestial events and sights that reappear at the same time with each passing year. The Earth, revolving around the Sun in its orbit, not only sees the night sky's constellations and deep-sky objects change along with its relative position to the Sun, but also encounters barely visible debris streams from volatile orbiting bodies - comets and asteroids - at predictable intervals throughout the year.

A liquor store employee in Virginia was startled on Saturday to discover smashed whisky bottles on the floor of the shop and, upon entering the bathroom, an apparently drunk, sleeping and spread-eagled raccoon. He fell through one of the ceiling tiles and went on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything, Samantha Martin, an local animal control officer, told the Daily Mail. The Hanover county animal protection and shelter confirmed the raccoon was drunk and said it had since become sober.

Airspace warning notices advising pilots to steer clear of the rocket's flight path suggest LandSpace has a launch window of about two hours. When it lifts off, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket will become the largest commercial launch vehicle ever flown in China. What's more, LandSpace will become the first Chinese launch provider to attempt a landing of its first stage booster, using the same tried-and-true return method pioneered by SpaceX and, more recently, Blue Origin in the United States.

For the first time, scientists have directly detected molecules in a Frisbee of gas and dust swirling around an alien gas-giant planet. I didn't think this was possible, says astronomer Sierra Grant of Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C. Typically such a faint signal would be invisible in the glare of a star. Grant and her co-author Gabriele Cugno of the University of Zurich, who published the results recently in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, think the carbon-rich disk is a lunar nursery.

In October 2024 Luke Durant, an independent researcher in San Jose, Calif., announced that he had discovered the largest known prime numberso enormous it would take years to write out in full. One might suspect only mathematicians would celebrate such a feat. But primes are often considered the building blocks of mathematics, and math itself is the scaffolding that supports everything from quantum theory and smartphone algorithms to the stability of bridges and even the odds at a casino.

We need to rethink what's possible for a eukaryotic cell in a significant way.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a method that allows them to create the darkest fabric ever made, inspired by the ultrablack feathers of the magnificent riflebird. In the study, the group says that material can be used to improve solar thermal systems as well as camouflage clothing designed for thermal control. It is because the bird's feathers can absorb almost all light with their complex physical structure and the melanin inside them.

The disturbance is causing a second spot of low pressure to develop off the mid-Atlantic coast. This other low is expected to intensify as it moves north toward Cape Cod over the course of today but will likely stay just shy of bomb cyclone territory, says Ashton Robinson Cook, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Prediction Center.