We don't have a really clear theoretical and experimental program to ask questions about the nature of life. Essentially, our working criteria are based exclusively on life on Earth. But across the vastness of the universe, life might present as radically different from what we've seen on our planet.
A core question we want to understand is where did matter come from. And then, if you know about antimatter, it's natural to ask, why is that not here? The process is not understood and we are hunting for clues as to why it happened, says Dr Christian Smorra, a physicist on the Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (Base) at Cern.
Pi is an infinitely long decimal number that never repeats. How do we know? Well, humans have calculated it to 314 trillion decimal places and didn't reach the end. At that point, I'm inclined to accept it. I mean, NASA uses only the first 15 decimal places for navigating spacecraft, and that's more than enough for earthly applications.
The park's namesake cave runs more than 400 miles under the earth's surface-and that's just the part that has been explored and mapped. Inside the aptly named Mammoth Cave, you'll find tube-like passageways, great rooms with sparkling walls, slot canyons, huge domes, and even a dripstone that resembles a frozen waterfall.
Superluminous supervnovae are 10 to 100 times brighter than expected, and while different theories exist, no-one is quite sure how that's possible. Now the wobbling signal from one of these super bright explosions has provided a possible answer.
The eruption generated significant heat and ash, USGS said, with some six inches of tephrabits of volcanic material, ranging from glasslike particles to rocks and ashaccumulating on a nearby golf course. Some glassy material, called Pele's hair for its strandlike structure, traveled as far as the city of Hilosome 30 miles away by car, USGS said.
The momentum enhancement factor for DART's impact was about two, meaning that the debris loss doubled the punch created by the spacecraft alone. The new study shows the impact ejected so much material from the binary system that it also changed the binary's orbital period around the Sun by 0.15 seconds.
Marine fossils have been discovered on mountain ranges around the world, including the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains, which scientists say were once covered by ancient seas before being pushed upward as continents collided and mountains formed.
Starfleet Academy has brought back a deadly substance 28 years after it was first introduced in canon, and, within the series timeline, over 800 years after Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) grappled with this stuff in the Delta Quadrant.
My mother first planted those same bulbs (or their parents) in her garden, which is half a mile from here, in the 1970s. When she died a decade ago, I took them first to our old house and now to this property. I'd actually forgotten the last transfer: a scoop of both the bulbs and surrounding soil, a short car journey, then a hasty reinterment in a hole on this south-facing slope.
Soon after it was spotted in December 2024, worldwide telescopic observations quickly positioned it as the most dangerous space rock ever discovered—one that stood a 3.1-percent (or 1-in-32) chance of crashing into Earth on December 22, 2032. If it were to hit one of the cities potentially in its path, this 60-meter asteroid would have unleashed a force comparable to several atomic bombs, devastating the unfortunate metropolis.
When black holes collide, the crash generates ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves. These distortions travel far out into the universe, but by the time they reach Earth, they have become faint, making them extremely hard to detect. Thanks to a global network of observatories—called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Virgo and the Kamioka Gravitational-Wave Detector (KAGRA)—scientists have found scores of these tiny wobbles in spacetime.
In a calm, thoughtful voice, he explained that though the equipment in his home lab was simple—including items such as a hot plate, scales and standard glassware found in a school science classroom—the experiment itself was more advanced. Fritz said the work focused on molecular structures used in pharmaceuticals and how they might be adapted to improve treatments for various diseases.
For its fifth anniversary, 'Secrets of' turns its lens to one of Earth's smallest yet most vital heroes: bees. Far more than pollinators, bees are socially complex, fast-thinking individuals and the most important insects on our planet. Their impact on the natural world and humanity is immeasurable, and we're only just beginning to see how extraordinary they truly are.
After washing and displaying them, I invited my colleagues to observe them. One colleague seemed very angry after examining them, picked up a piece straight away, hit it hard on the other stone fragments, and exclaimed, 'These kinds of broken stones can be seen everywhere on the road!' But later that fall, the French archaeologist Henri Breuil examined the crystals and agreed with Wenzhong: The crystals were not just stones, but artifacts collected by the early humans who lived in the cave.
We've documented sightings of glass squids to better understand the remarkable transformations they undergo from hatchlings to adults. This new observation, captured in ultra high-resolution 4K, allowed us to zoom in on a juvenile likely no bigger than a baby carrot and reveal more details than we have been able to see before.
Scientists of the 1970s look to the past and future of telecommunications, and a rainbow against a blue sky dazzles a reader, in this week's peek at Nature's archive. This article features text from Nature's archive. By its historical nature, the archive includes some images, articles and language that by twenty-first-century standards are offensive and harmful.
In the case of Robert Picardo, we were children when he was playing the Doctor on Voyager. So, you think to yourself, if we're going to get this actor to say yes, to come and give up years of their lives, put back on a uniform, we have to give them something good to sink their teeth into.
When Borkent stops working, biting midges risk becoming an orphan group, a term that taxonomists give for a branch of the web of life that is no longer being studied. It is a pattern playing out across the field, he says. I am one of the last few standing. It's crisis all around. As the taxonomic community ages, we are not being replaced.
A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth lines up between the moon and the sun. The sun's light is blocked casting a shadow on to the moon. But in some eclipses sunlight does reach the moon indirectly, daubing the moon in a sunset palette. Any light that does pass shines through our atmosphere and transforms the lunar surface into a deep, coppery red.
Because we're homeotherms, we assume all mammals work the way we do. But in recent years, as improvements in technology allowed researchers to more easily track small animals and their metabolisms in the wild, we're starting to find a lot more weirdness.
This system is truly extraordinary. We're seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. Fundamentally, masers and lasers are focused beams of light in the same frequency. In the realm of astrophysics, these can arise from clouds of dust being excited into a higher energy state from the light emitted by other sources, like stars and black holes.
A rare planetary lineup from late February will continue into early March, with six planets-Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune-appearing to trace the same path across the sky, known as the ecliptic. Because Mercury, Saturn, and Neptune set soon after sunset, you'll need to look shortly after twilight to see all six at once.
The formation closely matches the outline of the Buffalo Valley Intermediate Field, an emergency triangular airfield built in the 1930s to 1940s along early aviation routes. In Nevada and other Western US deserts, triangular airfields were common in the 1930s and 1940s, serving early aviation needs such as mail routes and emergency landings.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/TAL-echinus-geyser-yellowstone-GETSERERUPTYLWSTN0326-8c40baadf7dc429ca0de69c9b087b437.jpg)