Science

Science

Science is a slaughterhouse. We rarely acknowledge the degree to which animal life underwrites the research that provides us with medicines, or the regulation that keeps us safe. Live animals were used in 2.64m officially sanctioned scientific procedures in the UK in 2024, many of them distressing or painful and many of them fatal. But the government's new strategy to phase out animal testing published earlier this month suggests that in the near future emerging technologies

NASA officials are facing that exact predicament as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is set to fall from its orbit at the end of 2026, - but the agency has green lit an audacious plan that's one for the history books: a plane drops a rocket in mid air that's carrying a robotic satellite, which will then blast into space and boost the telescope's altitude, thereby saving it.

So in a lot of country music, you might describe the singer's voice as bright or brassy or sharp. But I bet the word you really want to use is twangy. TZU-PEI TSAI: Twangy voice, it refers to a bright timbre that sounds like a children's taunting - nya na nya na nya na nya - or a witch's cackling (cackling).

"I started wondering how our city environments potentially shape wild animals," Raffaela Lesch, a biologist from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the study's senior author, told SFGATE. "How might the environment where we live change them in a way that might be similar or the same to domestication? That's really the idea that sparked this work with the raccoons."

Two enormous structures that sit at the border between the Earth's mantle and its core have puzzled scientists for decades, defying reigning theories of how our planet came to be. In a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers led by Rutgers University geodynamicist Yoshinori Miyazaki has come up with a new explanation for these structures - suggesting, provocatively, that their formation may be closely tied to the evolution of life on Earth.

A used Tesla Model 3 is easily one of the best electric cars you can buyand probably one of the best cars, period. Tesla's original mainstream EV is abundant on the secondhand market, has solid range and charging specs, packs class-leading software and can be bought for well under $20,000 these days. But what's the deal with those batteries? Can you be confident that a years-old Tesla will still perform well? In general, the answer is yes.

"fuzzy white ball," per NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya, which is being lit up by the Sun - a "cloud of dust and ice called the coma, which is shed by the comet."

I wonder how many of you have reflected on this phenomenon: everything anyone has ever seen, or ever will see, makes up less than 5% of what is out there in the universe. All the people, all the faces, all the mountains, the moon, the stars, the galaxies, supernova-everything we've ever seen-is less than 5%. The rest is in the form of dark matter and dark energy, as yet unknown.

"To find the holes the third star has cut like a knife through the dust, look for the central point of light and trace a V shape from about 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock," NASA says.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health doled out about as much total grant funding in the recently ended fiscal year as they did the year before, despite the Trump administration's "unprecedented" earlier slowdown of federal science funding, Science reported Wednesday. According to the journal'sanalysis, "NSF committed approximately $8.17 billion to grants, fellowships, and other funding mechanisms in the 2025 fiscal year"-which ended Sept. 30-"about the same as in 2024." It found that NIH spending also remained level.

The synthetic tongue is made of a gel that contains milk powder, acrylic acid and choline chloride. When a current is applied to the gel, its chloride and hydrogen ions can conduct electricity because they are mobile. To monitor changes in conductivity, the scientists placed the gel between copper sheets and connected the whole contraption to a workstation that measures the electric current.

The white coating, a porous paint-like material, reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat, making surfaces up to 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air, even under direct sun. This cooler condition allows water vapor in the air to condense like dew on the smooth coating surface, where it can be collected. In a recent test, a roughly 10-square-foot area treated with the coating was able to harvest 1.6 cups of water over the course of single day.

If you don't mind peering through a sheet of glass, you can see a Quantum Computer at IBM's office in Waterloo. Known as the IBM Quantum System One, it is the first circuit-based commercial quantum computer, launched by IBM in January 2019. Quantum computers are capable of using the weird world of quantum physics and simplistically, where a standard computer bit can be either a binary One or Zero, a quantum computer can be both at the same time.

Tony Cheesman, who lives in the seaside town of Penguin, was walking his two dogs, Ronan and Custard, along the beach at Preservation Bay on Friday morning when something silvery and surrounded by gulls grabbed his attention. When I got to it, I saw this massive fish, then I noticed the beautiful colours, and it had these long fans coming out of its chin and the top of its head, he said. I'd never seen anything like it.

A biologist has shared the heartwarming moment he found one of the rarest flowers in the world, breaking down in tears over the discovery. Dr Chris Thorogood, associate professor of biology at the University of Oxford, had trekked day and night through the jungle to hunt for the incredibly rare Rafflesia hasseltii. These elusive plants only grow in the tiger-patrolled jungles of West Sumatra, Indonesia and bloom for only a few days.

'She will come over and act like a little mouse midwife and very carefully, with her mouth and her paws, pull the pup out,' Professor Robert Froemke, from NYU Langone Health, told the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California.

While much of the history of life on Earth is written, the opening chapters are murky at best. On our ever-changing world, the older a rock is, the more it has changed, obscuring or even erasing evidence of ancient life. Beyond a hazy boundary of circa two billion years, in fact, this interference is so total that no pristine, unaltered Earth rocks are known to exist, making any potential sign of biology as clear as mud. At least until now.

New research published in the journal Science suggests this protoplanet was actually a close neighbor of the early Earth, and formed somewhere between our homeworld and the sun. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Theia: Space forensics analyzing a billion-year-old murder The findings from a study led by researchers

Scott Tilley, a satellite researcher based out of British Colombia, uncovered evidence that some 171 SpaceX-built Starshield satellites have been broadcasting signals in the wrong direction, according to Ars Technica. The satellites were operated as part of the US government's National Reconnaissance Office surveillance program, which is meant to expand the country's ability to spy over other nations. According to Ars, Tilley discovered the SpaceX satellites were using a frequency which is internationally designated for Earth-to-space and space-to-space transmissions.

Although the plant is inedible, researchers say the findings could be important for space exploration. Dr Tomomichi Fujita, the lead author of the study, from Hokkaido University in Japan, said: While moss may not be on the menu, its resilience offers insights into developing sustainable life-support systems in space. Mosses could help with oxygen generation, humidity control or even soil formation.

They say the Goatman prowls the woods at night near my home in Maryland. He was once a biologist named Stephen Fletcher at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. That was before the accident with goat DNA transformed him into a half-­human, half-­goat monster who devours victims that he slays with an axe. It's been decades since I first heard of the Goatman.

"We figured out that if you do that, you're going to miss the eclipses, and we know they didn't. They made internal adjustments. We think they'd restart the table midway. When you do that, you go from having missed eclipses to having none. You would never miss an eclipse. So it's not a calculated predictive table, it's a calculated predictive table plus adjustments based on empirical observations over time."

Not everyone appreciates the artistry of Jackson Pollock's famous drip paintings, with some dismissing them as something any child could create. While Pollock's work is undeniably more sophisticated than that, it turns out that when one looks at splatter paintings made by adults and young children through a fractal lens and compares them to those of Pollock himself, the children's work does bear a closer resemblance to Pollock's than those of the adults.

The results appeared in the Science on 20 November . "This is probably the clearest demonstration of the neural pathways responsible for magnetic processing in any animal," says Eric Warrant, a sensory biology researcher at the University of Lund in Sweden. Studies have suggested that various animals, including turtles, trout and robins, can sense the direction and strength of magnetic fields, although the evidence has sometimes been contested - and the mechanisms have remained controversial.

In their system, the engineers use ultrasonic waves to shake the water out of the material that can absorb moisture from the air. This said material is an ultrasonic actuator made of a flat ceramic ring, which receives the electricity during vibrations. In their research, the team learned that this vibration can break the weak connection between the water molecules and the sorbent, so when the waves hit the flat ceramic ring and the system, the water inside it loosens and falls out as droplets,

Researchers and scientific journals can add a new possibility to a growing list of artificial intelligence-generated horrors: letters to the editor. Two days after researchers published a paper on the efficacy of ivermectin as a treatment for malaria in the New England Journal of Medicine this summer, the journal received a letter to the editor from another researcher criticizing the paper's findings.

Time is running out for the venerable NASA observatory. In September, the agency reckoned there was a 50 percent chance of an uncontrolled reentry by mid-2026, increasing to 90 percent by the end of the year. Although the spacecraft was launched in 2004, it remains operational and could continue to capture data on gamma-ray bursts if boosted to a higher orbit.

A single multipurpose gene-editing tool can correct several genetic conditions by restoring proteins that have been truncated by disease-causing mutations. The method might one day overcome a key stumbling block faced by gene-editing therapies: the need to design a bespoke treatment for each disease. The new approach, called PERT, combines gene editing with engineered RNA molecules that allow protein synthesis to continue even when a mutation in the DNA tells it to stop prematurely.

Last week, news emerged that the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft docked to China's Tiangong space station had sustained serious damage, likely due to space debris. The capsule was meant to allow a crew of three astronauts to return to Earth on November 5, but thanks to "tiny cracks" in the "return capsule's viewport window," the Shenzhou-20 crew had to return home on the Shenzhou-21 shuttle that delivered their replacements to the station instead, safely landing in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region last week.