Let’s suppose you were an astronaut who just landed on the planet Mars. What would you need to survive? For starters, here’s a short list: Water, food, shelter – and oxygen. Oxygen is in the...
There's a key aspect of quantum computing you may not have thought about before. Called 'quantum non-demolition measurements', they refer to observing certain quantum states without destroying...
On May 12, 2022, astronomers on the Event Horizon Telescope team released an image of a black hole called Sagittarius A* that lies at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Chris Impey, an astronomer...
For all their uncanny intelligence and seemingly supernatural abilities to change color and regenerate limbs, octopuses often suffer a tragic death. After a mother octopus lays a clutch of eggs, she...
One of the most recent snaps beamed back from the Curiosity rover on Mars has revealed a rather interesting feature in the rocks: what looks to be a perfectly carved out doorway nestling in the...
Satellites help run the internet and television and are central to the Global Positioning System. They enable modern weather forecasting, help scientists track environmental degradation and play a...
As the world’s need for large amounts of portable energy grows at an ever-increasing pace, many innovators have sought to replace current battery technology with something better. Italian...
We might not be able to hear sound in space, but that doesn't mean there isn't any. In 2003, astronomers detected something truly astonishing: acoustic waves propagating through the gas surrounding...
The molecules of life, DNA, replicate with astounding precision, yet this process is not immune to mistakes and can lead to mutations. If not for the errors in our genes we refer to as mutations,...
After nearly 13.8 billion years of nonstop expansion, the Universe could soon grind to a standstill, then slowly start to contract, new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National...
Until now odd and even categorization, also called parity classification, had never been shown in non-human animals. In a new study, published Friday in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and...
Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction,...
The Drake equation is one of the most famous equations in astronomy. It has been endlessly debated since it was first posited in 1961 by Frank Drake, but so far has served as an effective baseline...
The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792.458 km per second – just shy of a nice round 300,000km/s figure. The Sun is 150 million km away from Earth and light takes just eight minutes and 20...
Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock. But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open...
Our planet now has about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and every day humans generate emails, photos, tweets, and many other digital files that add another 2.5 million gigabytes of...
In a first for telepresence communication, a NASA flight surgeon was 'holoported' to the International Space Station (ISS), appearing and conversing as a virtual presence in real time, hundreds of...
Artificial intelligence can now read human emotions and use 5G technology to thwart terrorist attacks and crimes before they happen. Scientists have unveiled a realistic early version of the...
The first time we find evidence of life on a planet orbiting another star (an exoplanet), it is probably going to be by analysing the gases in its atmosphere. With the number of known...
Our Sun’s days are numbered. In about 5 billion years the Sun will expand into a red giant, casting off its outer layers before settling down to become a white dwarf. It’s the inevitable fate of...