Science

Science

For science enthusiasts in the United Kingdom, the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution (RI) are as much a part of the season's celebration as are Christmas trees and carol singing. These iconic talks for a young audience, celebrating their 200th anniversary this year, have introduced many people to the delights of science through captivating demonstrations. Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock is the next speaker to take to the floor, delivering this historic lecture series this week.

The soft, flexible device sits under the scalp but on top of the skull, where it delivers precise patterns of light through the bone to activate neurons across the cortex. In experiments, scientists used the device's tiny, patterned bursts of light to activate specific populations of neurons deep inside the brains of mouse models. (These neurons are genetically modified to respond to light.) The mice quickly learned to interpret these patterns as meaningful signals, which they could recognize and use.

From her office at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, she holds up a blue plastic model of a proteasome, a barrel-shaped structure with a hollow core. The function seems simple: proteins enter the chamber, where they are shredded and then exit as smaller peptide fragments. But the machinery is surprisingly elaborate. The core comprises more than two dozen protein subunits and can associate with a variety of regulatory caps.

Kyocera has demonstrated underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) technology that achieved 5.2 Gbps in lab tests, targeting video feeds and sensor data for ocean exploration and underwater robotics. The Japanese corp aims to enable real-time, large-volume data transmission for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and drones used in marine surveys, structural inspections, and resource exploration. Underwater communication faces significant challenges: acoustic systems manage only a few Kbps, while radio frequency delivers a few Mbps at short range.

Corneliszoon's sawmill, argues Davila, was mankind's first true industrial machine. A windmill turned a wheel. One component transformed the rotary motion into up-and-down motion for the cutting blade. Another component transformed the rotary motion into a sideway's motion feeding the log to the blade. A ratchet system moved the log forward one precise increment per cycle. Each element was modest on its own.

For a decade after its discovery, CRISPR gene editing was stuck on the cusp of transforming medicine. Then, in 2023, scientists started using it on sickle-cell disease, and Victoria Gray, a patient who lived with constant pain-like lightning inside her body, she has said -got the first-ever FDA-approved CRISPR gene-editing treatment. Her symptoms vanished; so did virtually everyone else's in the clinical trial she was a part of.

The Cradle of Humankind is a complex system of limestone caves that has the world's highest concentration of ancient human fossils. It's located about 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. When I started working there as a PhD student ten years ago, I never thought that I would be the person making discoveries. I always saw myself as a support person who helped the palaeontologists and archaeologists.

66 million years ago, a giant asteroid hit the earth at a whopping 45,000 miles per hour and changed the course of life on our planet. Today, the American Museum of Natural History is telling the story in a fascinating and educational new exhibit called "Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs." Impact transports visitors to a time before, during and after the catastrophic event occurred via interactive installments, immersive videos and realistic displays.

Scientists at Purdue University in Indiana have analysed photos of fragments of bleached clay, found by NASA's Perseverance rover. The fragments - which range from pebbles to boulders - suggest the Red Planet was warm and wet for millions of years. In fact, Mars may have been like the tropical regions of Earth such as the Amazon rainforest of South America and the Guinean Forests of West Africa. And they offer further evidence that the planet once had the right conditions to support life.

In May 1925, a strange decaying corpse washed ashore on Moore's Beach, now known as Natural Bridges State Beach, in Santa Cruz. Locals who swarmed out to investigate the specimen described elephantine legs, a fish-like tail and a long neck stretched across the sand. It was quickly dubbed a sea monster. Photographs published at the time reveal that much of the monster's carcass had collapsed, leaving only the head mostly intact. Its eyes were small, its forehead bulbous; its jaws formed a duck-like beak. Sensational accounts were plastered across newspapers from California to Texas.

When people replace the monster myth with ecological truth, they see sharks not as threats, but as marvels. Cultural narratives about sharks stands in the way of conservationfear drives policymyth drives management. Knowledge dissolves fear, compassion replaces misunderstanding, and empathy leads to protection. Sharks are fascinating animals with a range of personalities. They suffer from numerous misleading stereotypes and myths and instill fear in many people who so much as think about them.1 However, shark attacks on people are actually rare.2

Now, in a recent episode of "The Kardashians " her doctor told her that she has "holes" in her brain, based on recent scans, which are related to "low activity" and caused by chronic stress. Don't necessarily take it at face value. In a recent piece for The Conversation, Curtin University neurology senior research fellow Sarah Hellewell warned that there's little merit to the tech used by Kardashian's physician, and that we should take his diagnosis with a massive grain of salt.

The Earth's Surface geology layer depicts geologic units exposed at the Earth's surface in the conterminous United States, ranging in age from Quaternary glacial deposits and alluvium to Precambrian crystalline bedrock. In the U.S. West and Southeast, the map is a composite of 29 state geologic maps depicting geology at the Earth's surface. In the glaciated region of the Midwest and Northeast, the map is a composite of 21 state geologic maps depicting pre-Quaternary rocks ("bedrock"), 8 state geologic maps depicting Quaternary deposits, and 18 USGS Quaternary Atlas Series maps depicting Quaternary deposits. The Quaternary Atlas maps were used where modern state geologic maps were not available.

ESA / Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Mahler Day 7 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: A Warped View Through an Einstein Ring. You are seeing two galaxies here, one in front of the other. The more distant spiral galaxy appears warped and distorted due to the gravitational lensing occurring around a massive, much closer galaxy, which is part of galaxy cluster SMACSJ0028.2-7537.

Modern military aircraft reflect some of humanity's most sophisticated engineering achievements in the world. These planes combine cutting-edge technology, effective design, and top-of-the-line performance. They're built not only to fly faster and farther than ever before but also to accomplish a variety of other tasks, like gather intelligence, evade detection, and carry out specific missions. Today's incredibly built craft are a testament to true innovation, from stealth fighters that remain invisible on radar to surveillance aircraft that can track threats with precision.

For the first time in California, citizen scientists like Hernandez can join the effort to track monarch butterflies thanks to Blu+, a new generation of ultra-light tags that communicate using Bluetooth technology. Through the Project Monarch app, available for iPhone or Android, anyone with a smartphone can assist researchers in monitoring migration patterns by scanning their surroundings. If a Blu+ tagged butterfly flutters within a 100-yard range, the phone detects the signal and uploads data to a central database.

From monkeys beating out musical rhythms to dogs on CBD, we're seeing some truly hedonistic behaviour

Numerous stories have been written about the growing swarm of Starlink satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) over the past few years, as astronomers grow increasingly worried about the crafts' impact on their observation equipment. Launched by Elon Musk's SpaceX, each satellite has the potential to disrupt astronomy through both radio emissions and light pollution - and as the number of satellites grows, so too does the amount of interference. Now, a new study by researchers at NASA is warning that obstructions caused by SpaceX and other private satellite companies are becoming so severe that not even the Hubble Space Telescope is safe.

Some 4,500 years ago, people dug a series of deep, wide pits in the area near Durrington Walls in southern England. They were gemometrically arranged, forming a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) wide circle that enclosed over three square kilometers (1.16 square miles). Long mistaken for naturally occuring features, the circle of human-made shafts has now come to be understood as a colossal project that lends new dimensions to the Stonehenge landscape.

Astronomers have long sought a cosmic explanation for the Bible's Star of Bethlehem, the shining celestial object that, so the story goes, guided the wise men, or magi, from Jerusalem to greet the baby Jesus. One long-standing hypothesis held that the Star of Bethlehem was in fact a conjunction, perhaps between Jupiter and Saturn. But this holiday season, a scientist has presented a new contender: a comet.

The emerging consensus is striking-the mind does not merely interpret reality; it actively participates in shaping it. Across research on the placebo effect, athletic peak performance, and self-fulfilling prophecies, a consistent pattern appears: what we expect, believe, and even feel profoundly alters how we experience the world. Put differently, the mind is not a passive observer. It is a predictive, generative, reality-filtering system-one that continually constructs the lens through which we live our daily experiences.

Priceless rock extracted from Scotland's legendary Great Glen Fault could help answer 'fundamental questions about the history of the Earth'. Experts at the British Geological Survey say the extracted core sample - essentially rock pulled from Earth using a hollow drill - measures a total of about 5,000 feet. It has been taken from more than 2,000 feet below ground level along the Great Glen Fault, which stretches from Norway through Scotland to Ireland.

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.

Paul shared a video with his 6.4million followers on X Thursday night, showing a mysterious bright orb hovering over Puerto Rico on December 3. A member of Paul's business team claimed to have witnessed the unidentified object flying over a local marina on the island before shooting up into space and leaving a visible streak in the sky as it disappeared, the X post stated.

The billionaire CEO of the Columbia Sportswear Company has just made anyone who believes the Earth is flat an opportunity of a lifetime. Tim Boyle, 76, announced a new competition on Tuesday, which challenged 'flat Earthers' to find the actual edge of the planet and bring back a picture of the abyss that sits beyond. Boyle, who is worth an estimated $1.6billion, said the reward for their world-changing discovery would be the control of his $3billion family business, which was founded in 1938.

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.

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.