Science

Science

The South Atlantic Anomaly is not just a single block,

Hyperspectral satellites can detect subtle chemical or material changes on the ground that traditional satellites cannot, making them especially useful for things like tracking crop quality, water resources or damage from natural disasters. Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the technology is expected to significantly enhance national capacities in fields like precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, urban planning and disaster management.

Now, a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters might not have a satisfying answer - it argues that both theories are equally likely - but it does raise the stakes: if the first possibility turns out to be correct, it could be the first-ever concrete evidence that dark matter, the mysterious stuff that is believed to make up more than 26 percent of the universe, actually exists.

While some can inhale foods as hot as ghost peppers, others can barely tolerate a small amount of red peppers sprinkled atop a slice of pizza. And the significant variance in spice tolerance can seem like a mystery, but one's tolerance to heat is about more than grit - it has roots in science. Pepper's spiciness emanates from a compound known as capsaicin, a natural substance that binds to the same receptor in your mouth that detects heat and pain.

On an unassuming morning in rural West Texas, a woman named Ann Walter was puzzled whena huge hunk of metal descendedfrom the sky and crash landed in her neighbor's wheat field. There were NASA logos on the parachutes that carried the truck-sized object, which itself bore NASA markings. "It's crazy, because when you're standing on the ground and see something in the air, you don't realize how big it is," Walter told the Associated Press. "It was probably a 30-foot parachute. It was huge."

There are two main reasons. The first is that ethology is a very young discipline. Although humans have always observed animal behavior, and there are records of its study dating back to Aristotle, modern science has been taking this field seriously for less than a century. Therefore, at the beginning of the 2000s, hardly any animal behaviors reminiscent of teaching had been documented.

The idea likely took off from a half-understood bit of science: that your favorite souvenirs were creating a magnetic field that was somehow interfering with the fridge's internal sensors or compressor. That the magnets could, in theory, be "confusing" the refrigerator into working harder to maintain its temperature. In reality, though, the magnets on the outside of your fridge are far too weak to penetrate the insulated door or affect the circuits inside.

The Orionid shower is made up of particles from Halley's Comet burning in the atmosphere as Earth's orbit intersects the comet's path, according to NASA. This year, NASA says the view of the meteor shower will be spectacular. The Orionid shower gets its name the constellation Orion, which it appears alongside. For stargazers wondering where to look, Griffith Observatory says to keep your eyes on Orion's raised club.

Microsoft has made NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset available on Azure via the Windows giant's Planetary Computer platform. It seems an excellent use for all that Azure capacity - petabytes of global environmental data can be accessed through APIs or directly via Azure storage. "This flexible scientific environment allows users to answer questions about the data, and both build applications and use applications on top of the platform," Microsoft said.

Scientists have created a new phase of ice that can form at room temperature. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Materials, the new phase, dubbed XXI, requires extreme levels of pressure to form. As its name suggests, it's the twenty-first form of ice to have been identified, joining a fascinating array of other structures ranging from hexagonal and cubic to superionic, which can be found on the surface of gas and ice giants like Neptune or Uranus.

Atomic clocks keep time by monitoring the natural oscillations of atoms as they move between energy states. Each atom oscillates unimaginably fast. Cesium, for instance, vibrates more than 10 billion times every second. By locking lasers (in optical atomic clocks) or microwaves (in "traditional" atomic clocks) to those frequencies, scientists can measure time down to billionths of a second.

Led by Xin Zhang, a chemist at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, the team designed more than two dozen fluorescent proteins that differ not only by colour, but also in how much time they spend in their excited state - a property called the fluorescence lifetime. The researchers call these molecules time-resolved fluorescent proteins, or tr-FPs. Their findings were published online last month in Cell.

For generations a massive iron meteorite sat in the Somali desert, becoming a landmark where children played and herders sharpened their knives. Then in 2020 a group of armed men arrived to steal it. The El Ali meteorite contains three minerals never before seen naturally on Earth, making it scientifically priceless. But its journey from Somalia to the black market, with some research along the way, raises uncomfortable questions.

Our hominid ancestors faced a Pleistocene world full of dangers-and apparently one of those dangers was lead poisoning. Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define "modern" the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo.

Many astronomers are really driven by the search for Earth twins because I think deep down the natural endpoint of this whole goal of looking for planets is to answer the question: are we alone? That is a burning itch that I think many of us have our entire lives wanted to answer. I'm sure many of you feel the same way as well. So I think that was what really drives us.

The Orion spacecraft, which will fly four people around the Moon, arrived inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida late Thursday night, ready to be stacked on top of its rocket for launch early next year. The late-night transfer covered about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from one facility to another at the Florida spaceport. NASA and its contractors are continuing preparations for the Artemis II mission after the White House approved the program

The Orionids - one of two major meteor showers caused by remnants from Halley's comet - will peak with the arrival of a new moon, providing an excellent opportunity to see shooting stars without interference from moonlight. During Tuesday morning's peak, expect to see up to 20 meteors per hour in ideal viewing conditions, said Thaddeus LaCoursiere, planetarium program coordinator at the Bell Museum in St. Paul, Minnesota. Viewing lasts until Nov. 7.

The puzzle, a copper sculpture engraved with four coded messages, has fascinated professional and amateur cryptographers since 1990, when artist Jim Sanborn installed it at the CIA's headquarters in Virginia. The four encrypted messages are made up of 869 characters . The final section, K4, begins with OBKR and contains 97 letters. To claim a solution, one must show how they decoded it from that ciphertext.

One of these researchers is Randal Halfmann at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been studying immune cells that self-destruct when they come into contact with molecules that present a threat to the body. "They have to somehow recognize that [threat] in this vast array of other complex molecules," he says, "and then within minutes, kill themselves." They do this much the way a soldier might dive on a grenade to save others' lives.

"What do you think would look better: pink or green?" The bubblegum hue won. A scientist from the Swiss public university ETH Zurich nodded, pulling out a bottle of pink dye to release from the top of the Rhone Glacier in the Swiss Alps. Turning the rivulet flowing down a melting glacier into a bright-pink stream was the least scientific test carried out this day.

For the past 15 years, the BioRescue Project an international consortium dedicated to saving the species has been collecting and preserving sperm from deceased males. Using this genetic material and egg cells from Fatu, they've created 38 embryos. It may sound like a lot, but it's not. Since Najin and Fatu cannot carry a pregnancy, surrogate mothers are essential and it was decided to use southern white rhinos, a less endangered subspecies.

Szostak began his talk by posing a question to the audience: Is life common in the universe, or is Earth a rare exception? While the discovery of exoplanets leads many to believe life could be widespread, Szostak said that the complexity of cell formation makes that seem less probable. Central to Szostak's talk was the "RNA World" hypothesis - the idea that early life initially revolved around RNA molecules before the advent of complex cellular structures.

Recall transiently destabilizes memories, which require re-stabilization to become long-lasting. Despite its importance in human cognition and neuropsychiatric disorders6,7, the mechanisms that specifically stabilize memories of critical experiences-those that are essential for survival and frequently marked by emotional salience and repetition-remain incompletely understood. Memory traces are linked to specialized neuronal ensembles (neuronal engrams), which include neuronal populations that become Fos+ during both initial and repeated experiences8.

In the bulk and at room temperature (RT), water exhibits exceptionally high dielectric constant ( εbulk ≈ 80) and high (for a wide-bandgap insulator) electrical conductivity ( σbulk ≈ 10 −5 S m −1)1. Both characteristics are inherently connected with the ability of water molecules to form hydrogen bonds11,12,13 and are key to the main properties of water. Among them is its remarkable ability to dissolve more substances than any other liquid7,8, which originates from the high εbulk of water that efficiently suppresses Coulomb interactions between solutes.

CHICAGO -- The mystery of that infamous "Chicago Rat Hole" on the sidewalk may be solved! There was actually research done about it just published in Biology Letters. Scientists believe that outline is not of a rat - but more likely a squirrel. Using the measurements of the imprint, they say the impression resembles a squirrel: stocky and semi-aquatic, with webbed feet.

For a long time, Paranthropus boisei, a hominid that inhabited the Earth from 2.6 million years ago to 1.3 million years ago, had been considered by experts to be a relative of humans. Its robust jaw, large molars, and powerful chewing muscles evidenced a diet as primitive as it was difficult to process, consisting of tough grasses and reeds that other species perhaps couldn't consume.

But this new one, dubbed GRB 250702B, blows everything we know about these fearsome blasts out the water. For starters, it lasted a staggering seven hours, which is vastly longer than they typically do. And it also appeared to repeat several times over its run, which shouldn't be possible. A GRB is produced by the total obliteration of a star, so how could the same source emit multiple blasts?

My father, Andrew Coates, who has died aged 86, had a professional life in three acts: as a technical illustrator in the aviation sector, as a technical adviser to lighthouse keepers and as a teacher. Andrew had been born completely deaf, and so each of those work paths had their challenges. But perhaps his greatest achievements were outside the workplace.

Why are bad habits so hard to break? Neuroscientist Carl Hart, PhD, journalist Charles Duhigg, and psychologist Adam Alter, PhD explain how your brain wires habits as cue-routine-reward loops that control nearly half of your daily life. They show why willpower alone rarely works, why technology fuels new forms of addiction, and why habits can only be replaced, not erased.

Hands A and C are pointing exactly at hour marks. If one of these two hands is the hour hand, the minute and second hands should both be on top of each other and point at 12. Because this is not the case, B must be the hour hand. Because the minute hand points to a full minute, the second hand must point to 12.