Category: Science News

Scientists have finally managed to bottle the sun. Nuclear fusion powers stars, including our sun. To do it, lightweight atoms fuse together to form heavier elements. They release energy in the process. To make them fuse, high temperatures and pressures must squeeze atoms together. Intense gravity does much of this work inside stars. But fusion is...

Following the most severe known mass extinction in Earth’s history, vibrant marine ecosystems may have recovered within just a million years, researchers report in the Feb. 10 Science. That’s millions of years faster than previously thought. The evidence, which lies in a diverse trove of pristine fossils discovered near the city of...

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have built a robotic finger that, much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s titular cyborg assassin, is covered in living human skin. The goal is to someday build robots that look like real people – albeit for more altruistic applications. Super realistic-looking robots could more seamlessly interact with...

With the zap of a laser, trash can literally become treasure. In a new experiment, physicists shined a laser at bits of PET. That’s the kind of plastic used in soda bottles. The laser blast squeezed the plastic to about a million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure. It also superheated the material....

Not long ago, researchers in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest saw something strange. They had been following a group of black lion tamarins every day for weeks. Small and agile, these endangered New World monkeys sport a long black mane and golden rump. And one day, recalls researcher Olivier Kaisin, “We witnessed...

A new supercomputer just passed a major milestone. It is the first to officially reach the “exascale.” That means it can perform at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second. You can simply refer to that as a quintillion calculations per second! The new computer is called Frontier. Its exascale status was announced on May 30...

New data show that a comet discovered in 2014 is one for the record books. This frigid object, dubbed Bernardinelli-Bernstein, is the largest comet ever spotted. Comets are chunks of rock and ice that orbit the sun. Such “dirty snowballs” in space are often surrounded by clouds of gas and...

Plants can’t get COVID-19, but they can get infected by a range of other viruses. Some of those viruses can cause huge problems for crops. A ringspot virus, for instance, threatens papaya fruit trees in Taiwan. Options exist to fight plant viruses, such as proteins to treat leaves. But two...

Bzzz. Oh no — a mosquito. Have you ever wondered how these small insects are so good at finding you? A new study has just identified one way they home in on us. It’s visual. Mosquitoes just like the look of our skin. Claire Rusch studies these bloodsuckers at the...

Avalanches of ash, gas and rock can cascade downhill during volcanic eruptions. Known as pyroclastic flows, they may be even more dangerous than scientists had suspected. Those pulses are the result of turbulence, lab and field measurements now show. Within these slides, pulses of high pressure form. Those pressures can be far...

The millipedes we’ve known have been a lie. The Latin name for these arthropods implies an impressive set of 1,000 feet. Yet no millipede had ever been found with more than 750. Until now. This first millipede to live up to its name tunnels through deep soil using 1,306 little legs. In...

Brains are like sponges, slurping up new information. But sponges may also be a little bit like brains. Sponges, which are humans’ very distant evolutionary relatives, don’t have nervous systems. But a detailed analysis of sponge cells turns up what might just be an echo of our own brains: cells called...

The cosmos keeps outdoing itself. Extremely energetic light from space is an unexplained wonder. Scientists don’t know where that light comes from, exactly. And now astronomers have spotted this light, called gamma rays, at higher energies than ever before. You can’t see gamma rays with your eyes. They are much...

Earth’s geographic poles aren’t fixed. Instead, they wander in seasonal and near-annual cycles. The weather and ocean currents drive most of this slow drift. But a sudden zag in the direction of that drift started in the 1990s. That sharp change in direction appears due in large part to the melting...

Physicists have measured the shortest span of time ever. It’s 0.000000000000000000247 second, also known as 247 zeptoseconds. And this period is how it takes a single particle of light to pass through a molecule of hydrogen. Not familiar with zeptoseconds? Take all the seconds that have passed since the beginning...

Past observations had suggested there’s water on the moon. New telescope observations now find those findings hold water. Spacecraft had seen evidence of water ice in permanently shadowed craters. This was at the moon’s poles. There also had been hints of water molecules on the sunlit surface. But water sightings...

Most foods we eat are an explosion of flavor. But the tongue itself only detects a few major tastes — sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami (that’s savory). Notice anything missing? Where is the taste for fat? It’s much of what makes butter and cream so delicious. A new study now confirms...

Predators that tread on a colony of parchment tube worms may find themselves slimed. The worms get their name from the papery tubes in which they live. When threatened, these ocean creatures ooze a sticky mucus that can glow blue for days. Such light produced by animals, bacteria or algae...

Winds are picking up worldwide, and that is making the surface waters of the oceans swirl a bit faster, researchers report. A new analysis of the ocean’s kinetic energy, measured by thousands of floats around the world, suggests that surface ocean circulation has been accelerating since the early 1990s. Some...