There are huge, invisible structures in the ionosphere that are high above the surface of the Earth. These structures are called equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). These turbulent areas of low-density plasma can be up to 60 miles (100 km) wide and mess up GPS signals, scramble radio communications, and even cause deadly military accidents. Now, ...
For more than 150 million years, science didn’t notice a small, fast-moving dinosaur that lived in the floodplains of Jurassic North America. It lived in the shadow of giants like Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. Palaeontologists are now having to rethink what they thought they knew about how dinosaurs evolved because of a new species called Enigmacursor ...
Asteroid 2024 YR4, which used to be thought to be on a collision course with Earth and could “kill a city,” has changed course and is now 4.3% likely to hit the Moon in December 2032 instead of hurting our planet. If it hits, it could send a lot of lunar debris flying, some of ...
Scientists are storing an unusual resource deep in the Swiss Alps that could one day save human waste. The Microbiota Vault, a “doomsday” freezer bank, already has more than 1,200 frozen stool samples. By 2029, it hopes to have 10,000. But why? Modern lifestyles, antibiotics, processed foods, and damage to the environment are all destroying ...
MIT engineers have figured out how to get clean water from desert air without using electricity or pumps. This is one of nature’s most difficult codes to break. Their newest invention, a window-sized panel that looks like high-tech bubble wrap, has pushed the limits of collecting water from the air by making drinkable water in ...
Archaeologists have been arguing for years about the social structure of Çatalhöyük, a big Neolithic settlement in Turkey that was around from 7100 to 6000 BCE. Was it a society where women were in charge, or was it something else? Finally, a new study published in Science has answered this question. The study shows that ...
The story of the “Pharaoh’s Curse” haunted archaeologists for hundreds of years. It started with the excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and continued with the mysterious deaths of teams in Poland’s Casimir IV crypt in the 1970s. Scientists have now found a shocking twist: the fungus that was thought to be responsible for ...
Imagine waking up in your 20s with brittle bones, cataracts, graying hair of a 70-year-old, and unhealing wounds. For those with Werner syndrome, a rare genetic condition causing terrible acceleration of aging, this is their reality. Often referred to as “adult progeria,” this disorder compresses decades of decline into just years rather than merely mimics ...
Scientists warn that the silently crossing of a crucial threshold by the world’s oceans could destroy marine ecosystems, collapse fisheries, and upset coastal economies. With acidity levels now exceeding safety limits in almost 60% of deep ocean waters 129, a ground-breaking study published in Global Change Biology shows that ocean acidification breached its planetary “danger ...
Among the most energetic events in the universe’s catalog of violent events since the Big Bang, astronomers have found a new extreme in the class of cosmic explosions. Dubbed extreme nuclear transients (ENTs), these rare, ultra-luminous events were seen in the centers of far-off galaxies where supermassive black holes split apart large stars in catastrophic ...
