OMG science

OMG science

Astronomers say the space rock, called 2026 JH2, is up to four times the size of a London bus and will get 'as close as you can without hitting'. It is expected to zoom by our planet at an estimated distance of around 56,000 miles (90,000km) at 10:23pm BST. This is exceptionally close - the equivalent of just a quarter of the distance between us and the moon.

One thing that has always been suspicious to us as chemists is that their only cargo was almost pure ethanol. In fact, the Mary Celeste was filled with over 1,700 barrels of pure alcohol, but when investigators came on board, nine of these barrels were mysteriously empty. Scientists think that up to 1,100 litres of ethanol leaked into the hold and vaporised, creating the perfect conditions for a terrifying fireball.

During the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert—the world’s very first test of an atomic bomb—a new material spontaneously formed. It was discovered only recently, by an international research team coordinated by geologist Luca Bindi at the University of Florence, which identified the novel clathrate based on calcium, copper, and silicon. It’s a material never before observed either in nature or as an artificial compound created in the laboratory.

When marine snow made of dead plankton's shells, fish poop, dust particles, and other debris descends to the ocean floor, it carries atmospheric carbon the plankton used to make their calcite shells. It's one of the ways the ocean stores carbon, helping to keep greenhouse gases from turning the planet into an oversize toaster oven. Yet scientists realized that something has been dissolving those calcite shells and releasing carbon dioxide, reducing the ocean's carbon-trapping capacity.

Half of laboratory mice are not what scientists think they are, a genetic analysis of hundreds of strains that are distributed globally for animal research has found. The study, published today in Science, uncovered widespread inconsistencies between the reported names of mouse strains and their actual genetic makeup. The mismatches have the potential to compromise the reproducibility of mouse studies and undermine research conclusions, scientists say.

Researchers in China have analysed proteins from the tooth enamel of six fossils dating back around 400,000 years five men and one woman found at sites across much of the country from north to south. They were able to recover two proteins, and one of them the M273V variant of the enamel protein ameloblastin is key. The results show that this protein is present in all the fossils analyzed, which belonged to our ancestor Homo erectus.

I ended up printing out a picture of an Irish friendship ring. Even while I was presenting it, it just felt like a total lie because I had no connection to it. I just wanted the assignment to be over. She managed to meet her family on a three-day layover in South Korea, on the way back to the US from Guam on a research trip.

Somebody should get Bob," says one of the crew as soon as it becomes clear, even on their low-resolution black-and-white monitor, that they're looking at man-made objects on the sea floor. And well they should have: the Bob in question is oceanographer and Argo inventor Robert Ballard, who'd been actively thinking about how to find the Titanic since at least the early nineteen-seventies and boarded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's R/V Knorr with intent to find it.

“This fluid connection is evidence that the fault boundary of the Kafue Rift is active. 'Therefore, the Southwest African Rift Zone is too - and may be an early indication of the break-up of sub-Saharan Africa.'”

Around 66 million years ago, a six-mile (10km)-wide space rock called Chicxulub smashed into Mexico. The impact famously wiped out the dinosaurs, caused worldwide devastation and changed the course of history. The collision released a huge dust and soot cloud that partially blocked out the sun and caused temperatures to plummet - and in the years that followed, it wiped out more than 50 per cent of all animal and plant species on Earth.

Back in 2003, when he was at Oxford, Bostrom penned an influential philosophical paper with the incredible title of “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Loosely speaking, his argument was that sufficiently advanced civilizations will eventually build sophisticated simulations of their own ancestors - and that, given enough time in the simulation, those simulated beings will develop their own simulation inside the simulation, where a new set of simulated ancestors will do the same thing, ad infinitum.

The special sky colourings, caused by solar particles colliding with Earth's magnetic field, could be more visible than usual in the UK this week, according to experts, thanks to a recent powerful blast from the Sun.

During the expedition's first ten days, the ship navigated a strong storm, with ocean swells reaching two to three metres. Still, the sights were remarkable. "Lot of good remote birds!" the scientist texted friends. Then one of them sent him a link to a news story about an outbreak of a hantavirus, a potentially deadly pathogen traditionally carried by rodents, which had been reported on a cruise ship. "Please tell me you're not on this ship," the friend wrote.

Scientists called it trinitite. Now researchers have identified a new material within trinitite called a clathratea cagelike chemical lattice that traps other atoms inside it. It's a completely new kind of clathrate crystal—something never seen before in nature or in the products of a nuclear explosion, says Luca Bindi, a geologist at the University of Florence in Italy, who is co-author of a new study detailing the finding.

Experts have discovered foetuses 'catch' yawns from their mothers and have been seen slowly opening and closing their mouths. As part of a study, they recorded the facial expressions of pregnant women while an ultrasound machine captured real-time images of their foetuses' faces. By comparing the two records, the researchers found that foetuses were more likely to yawn after their mothers did, with a delay of around 90 seconds.

However, when it comes to the objects beyond Saturn, including the Uranian and Neptunian systems, as well as everything that lies in the Kuiper belt and beyond, the only probes we've ever sent their way are Voyager 2, which flew by Uranus and Neptune in the late 1980s, and New Horizons, which flew past Pluto in 2015.