Science

Science

German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, 73, takes the stage. He then begins his lecture in the most unexpected way: What's the point of talking about black holes if all the Hollywood producers already know what they are? Going into them is easy, but once you do ooooh. The audience made up of a couple of hundred professors and students from 20 countries is taken aback.

Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We're so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat. The world is full of such shapes-ones that look flat to an ant living on them, even though they might have a more complicated global structure. Mathematicians call these shapes manifolds. Introduced by Bernhard Riemann in the mid-19th century, manifolds transformed how mathematicians think about space.

"Undercutting our science community like this is only going to hurt Americans," Balch said.

When you began to reminisce, brain cells dormant just seconds before began firing chemicals at one another. That action triggered regions of your brain involved in processing emotions, which is why you may have re-experienced some feelings you did at the time of the event. Chemical and electrical signals shot out to the rest of your body. If you were stressed before you began this exercise, your heart rate probably slowed and stabilized as levels of cortisol and other stress hormones decreased in your blood.

Like the moon's shadow sweeping across the globe during a total solar eclipse, astronomy-focused tourism is taking the world by storm. And in 2026, there are plenty of celestial reasons to travel. You've likely already heard of the August 2026 total solar eclipse, which is undoubtedly the year's marquee event, but you can also travel for everything from rocket launches to meteor showers. These are the astronomy events that can turn trips into once-in-a-lifetime experiences-and where to go to see them at their best.

The biggest science story this year was the political upheaval in the United States. Funding cuts, academic lay-offs and vaccine-sceptic policies have widely been seen as an attack on science, according to critics of President Donald Trump's administration. The resulting damage to science could last way into the future. But, there were also plenty of positive developments in 2025 that offer hope for the coming years.

As a science communicator, I don't think a week goes by without a press release hitting my inbox informing me of astronomers finding some new record-breaking object. Sometimes it's the smallest planet yet discovered or the most iron-deficient star. But a very common claim is a distance record: the farthest galaxy from Earth ever seen, for example. When it comes to these sorts of record breakers, I have complicated feelings, built over decades of writing about them.

One might suppose that at its greatest depths, the icy, dark water would be inhospitable to muchbut a new discovery reminds us that that is far from the case. Off the coast of Greenland, the deep seafloor is littered with towering mounds made of crystallized methane and other gases. Known as the Freya hydrate mounds, these structures act like a frozen reef, a haven for creatures that have evolved to live in environments unlike any other on Earth.

For more than two decades, scientists at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have occasionally spotted a little translucent creature in the ocean's midnight zone. The gelatinous blob uses a hood surrounding its head to catch prey and has detachable tentacles; its hood and tail are decorated with glowing blue-green dots. This year, scientists finally figured out what it isthe mystery mollusk is actually a nudibranch, or sea slug. In fact, it's from an entirely new family of nudibranchs and has been dubbed Bathydevius caudactylus.

No, I don't want a candle that smells like turkey, because, well, we'll be cooking turkey. Nor do I want a sunrise alarm clock that mimics natural light, because I can leave the curtains open. And I definitely don't want a salmon DNA pink collagen jelly mask (Good Housekeeping's Best for Beauty Lovers), because said DNA comes from milt. AKA semen. If I wanted fish sperm on my face, I would tickle some pollocks.

Longevity - or living healthier for longer - is a hot topic, drawing millions of readers to Business Insider and driving billions of dollars of investment worldwide. It's easy to see why the promise of a medical fountain of youth is enticing to both the average person and those peddling snake oil, looking to make a quick buck. That's why Business Insider is launching its Rising Stars of Longevity list, to celebrate and acknowledge those in the longevity space outpacing their peers with meaningful, impactful work.

The agency last heard from the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) orbiter on December 6, and the last fragment of tracking data recovered by engineers indicated that the probe was tumbling and that its orbit trajectory might have changed. The latter point is highly significant - if any engineers can't work out where the spacecraft is, contacting it is highly challenging, either from Earth or using one of the other Mars orbiters or rovers.

By day, virologist Chris Buck works for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Maryland, where he's discovered four of the 13 polyomaviruses we know to affect humans, Science News reports. But by night, he runs Gusteau Research Corporation, a one-man shell company he established so he could experiment on his bubbly inoculation: an ingestible polyomavirus vaccine. To make the beer, Buck engineered a special strain of yeast infused with polyomavirus-like particles.

If your kids love skating but you dread the cold and the crowds, this indoor winter attraction might be just what you're looking for, and your kids will surely love it. The New York Hall of Science just opened its newest interactive attraction, Space Glide. This limited-time indoor skating experience trades ice and blades for a smooth, sock-style glide, set against a glowing backdrop that simulates deep space.

Imagine there's a large, flat sheet of ice out in front of you, and someone unceremoniously shoves you across it at a high speed. What are you to do? If you're wearing conventional shoes, without crampons or blades attached to them, you're going to have a difficult time. Ice is a very low-friction surface, and there's very little you're going to be able to do to change your momentum without slipping and perhaps falling down.

The discovery represents a significant find in the study of the deep ocean, the largest ecosystem on the planet but one that is inhospitable to humans and remains largely unexplored. During a 2023 expedition aboard the E/V Nautilus, scientists using the remotely operated vehicle Hercules spotted a fragment of sunken wood resting off the remote Johnston Atoll. As they drew closer, they found a thriving community that included a large population of strange limpets - oval, pale, and thick-shelled, with a distinctive arched profile.

"This is a lot of shaking for the people in the San Ramon area to deal with," Sarah Minson, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Science Center at California's Moffett Field, told SFGATE. "It's quite understandable that this can be incredibly scary and emotionally impactful, even if it's not likely to be physically damaging or related to any sort of threat of a larger magnitude earthquake."

In laboratory experiments, early-stage human embryos donated from couples after IVF treatment successfully implanted into the engineered lining and began to churn out key compounds, such as the hormone that results in a blue line on positive pregnancy tests. The approach allowed scientists to eavesdrop on the chemical chatter that arises between the embryo and the womb lining as it embeds and begins to be nourished in the first weeks of gestation.

Imagine a healthy forest, home to a variety of species: Birds are flitting between tree branches, salamanders are sliding through leaf litter, and wolves are tracking the scent of deer through the understory. Each of these animals has a role in the forest, and most ecologists would argue that losing any one of these species would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole.

This Hubble image features a trio of galaxies that appear to be very close together, but appearances can be deceiving. The large spiral galaxy at the bottom right is NGC 1356. The two apparently smaller spiral galaxies flanking it are LEDA 467699 ( top) and LEDA 95415 ( left).

Meteorologists and their weather models have not come to any agreement about whether Tuesday's incoming storm will meet the criteria of a "bomb cyclone," but suffice it to say it will be really windy and wet. There is a huge area of low pressure out over the Pacific Ocean, carrying with it wind, rain, and potential thunderstorms, and it is scheduled to hit the Northern California coast with a vengence by 7 pm.

I spent the early years of my PhD at an Austrian non-academic research institute, where competing for grants was the only way that my colleagues and I could secure funding for our research. Everything else we did, from publishing papers to presenting at conferences, felt designed, ultimately, to help secure the next grant. The system seemed back to front: surely it should be about the science first?

Shares in Rocket Lab Corp were heading for their second day of gains on Monday after the aerospace manufacturer was named as one of four companies that will build tracking satellites for the U.S. Space Development Agency (SDA). The stock (Nasdaq: RKLB) was up more than 4% in premarket trading on Monday as of this writing. That's in addition to a jump of 17% on Friday when the news was announced. Share are now trading at record highs.

A hot spring in Yellowstone national park that erupts sporadically was captured on an official camera exploding in spectacular muddy plumes at the weekend. Volcanic experts at the US Geological Survey described the eruption as simply Kablooey! The tumult occurred at the Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone on Saturday morning and provided dramatic footage. Video shared by the USGS on social media shows mud spraying up and out from the murky hot spring just before 9.23am local time in Biscuit Basin.

A tawny owl screeches nearby in the dark and her mate replies, hooting eerily from the forest below. A white dome floats in the gloaming above a plain black doorway outlined with red light, like a portal to another dimension. I'm in Grizedale Forest, far from any light-polluting cities, to visit the Lake District's first public observatory and planetarium, which opened in May.

"The lapse \"resulted in NIST UTC [universal coordinated time] being 4.8 microseconds slower than it should have been,\" NIST spokesperson Rebecca Jacobson said in an email. That's just under 5 millionths of a second. To understand just how brief an instant that is, Jacobson noted that it takes a person about 350,000 microseconds to blink."

Cody Stylianou thought he saw a huge trout. But, skimming just below the surface, it was moving differently than a fish would. The creature surfaced and, amazed, the Victorian fisher reached for his phone. Swimming in front of him was a pink platypus. Stylianou regularly fishes in the Gippsland spot, which he is keeping secret to protect the rare animal. He thinks it could be the same one he saw years ago, just older and bigger.

The, the degree to which Starshipis a revolutionary technology is not well understood in the world. "It's the first time that there's been any rocket design, where full rapid reusability is possible - well, full reusability at all is possible, or full reusability at all is possible," Musk's word salad continued. "This is the first design where a reusable rocket is one of the possible - with success - is one of the possible outcomes."

With the use of a bootstrap experimental setup consisting of a large polystyrene ball, a curved computer monitor, and a small straw that dispenses sugar water, Tóth managed to teach a rat how to play the classic 1994 video game Doom II. The rat's movements translated into rotations of the ball, which were then translated into movement inside the iconic first-person shooter. The sugar water served as a treat whenever the rat completed a milestone, like walking down a corridor.

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception. The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun

Military weapons are often introduced with bold promises like greater efficiency, revolutionary design, and battlefield dominance on paper. But war has a way of stripping those promises down to their essentials. When weapons leave testing ranges and enter real combat, factors like dirt, stress, logistics, and human error quickly expose weaknesses that no specification sheet can predict, or any human for that matter. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a look at some of these weapons that did not hold up under the pressures of combat.

The roughly Jupiter-mass object, designated PSR J2322-2650b, orbits just one million miles away from its star, or one percent of the Earth's distance from the Sun, with a single "year" lasting just 7.8 Earth hours. And at such proximity, the extreme gravity of the star - an exotic type known as a pulsar - pulls the entire planet into an oblong shape, like a lemon or a football.

In the days leading up to the winter solstice, amber streetlights switch on ever earlier as dusk falls over Flagstaff, Ariz., casting the city in a soft, warm hue. Longer nights mean even more time to spend under hundreds of stars and the cloudy swath of the Milky Way galaxy, which are visible even from the city's downtown. Spectacular views of the night sky are a given for the more than 77,000 residents of the world's first and largest dark sky city,