Science

Science

Around 410 million years ago, terrestrial life was relatively simple. There were no forests or prairiesland was largely dominated by slimy microbial mats. The types of plants that would eventually give rise to trees and flowers had only just evolved and would take another several million years to fully flourish and diversify. A new discovery is rewriting the story of how these vascular plants, as they are called, spread onto land.

NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year,

What is the road system that connects all four towns using the smallest total length of road? What perhaps feels like the right answer is a network where opposing towns are connected in straight lines. If the square has side length 1km, the total length is about 2.83km In fact, the minimal network is the one below, which shaves off about 4 per cent of the length of the X solution.

In cancer biology, there's a conundrum known as Peto's paradox: Large animals have lots of cells, which in theory should mean more chances to develop cancer. And long-lived organisms have more time to acquire the mutations needed to transform healthy cells into cancerous ones. And yet "that's not what happens," says Vera Gorbunova, a biologist at the University of Rochester. "It suggests that these large and longer-lived animals have additional protections from cancer that they evolved."

The gravitational forces of a primordial black hole would be so strong that they would tear the cells of your brain apart from the inside out. Professor Scherrer says: 'A sufficiently large primordial black hole, about the size of an asteroid or larger, would cause serious injury or death if it passed through you. 'It would behave like a gunshot.'

The Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC, announced today that one of its Asian elephants, Nhi Linh (pronounced NEE-lin), is pregnant and could give birth to the first baby calf born at the facility in nearly a quarter century. If the pregnancy continues on track, the calf should be born between mid-January and early March. According to a press release, the zoo's 44-year-old male elephant, Spike, mated with 12-year-old Nhi Linh in April 2024.

Beneath the idyllic resort towns of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, daring explorers have uncovered a hidden world of grand chambers and twisting tunnels. The Ox Bel Ha, Mayan for 'Three Paths of Water', is a sprawling water 'web' that makes up the world's longest underwater cave system. In this vast network, researchers have found giant sink holes, huge crystal chambers known as ice palaces, and 38 unique species of cave-dwelling animals.

What can an elephant seal - a 4,000 pound, bellowing monstrosity that looks like a melted Yankee Candle - teach us about the world? Plenty, it turns out. "The animals are amazing. I mean, everything they do is extreme," says Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. "They're the deepest-diving pinniped and they dive for longer than any other seal or sea lion. They also fast for longer. Everything they do is just pushing the limits."

Science is a slaughterhouse. We rarely acknowledge the degree to which animal life underwrites the research that provides us with medicines, or the regulation that keeps us safe. Live animals were used in 2.64m officially sanctioned scientific procedures in the UK in 2024, many of them distressing or painful and many of them fatal. But the government's new strategy to phase out animal testing published earlier this month suggests that in the near future emerging technologies

NASA officials are facing that exact predicament as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is set to fall from its orbit at the end of 2026, - but the agency has green lit an audacious plan that's one for the history books: a plane drops a rocket in mid air that's carrying a robotic satellite, which will then blast into space and boost the telescope's altitude, thereby saving it.

So in a lot of country music, you might describe the singer's voice as bright or brassy or sharp. But I bet the word you really want to use is twangy. TZU-PEI TSAI: Twangy voice, it refers to a bright timbre that sounds like a children's taunting - nya na nya na nya na nya - or a witch's cackling (cackling).

"I started wondering how our city environments potentially shape wild animals," Raffaela Lesch, a biologist from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the study's senior author, told SFGATE. "How might the environment where we live change them in a way that might be similar or the same to domestication? That's really the idea that sparked this work with the raccoons."

Two enormous structures that sit at the border between the Earth's mantle and its core have puzzled scientists for decades, defying reigning theories of how our planet came to be. In a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers led by Rutgers University geodynamicist Yoshinori Miyazaki has come up with a new explanation for these structures - suggesting, provocatively, that their formation may be closely tied to the evolution of life on Earth.

A used Tesla Model 3 is easily one of the best electric cars you can buyand probably one of the best cars, period. Tesla's original mainstream EV is abundant on the secondhand market, has solid range and charging specs, packs class-leading software and can be bought for well under $20,000 these days. But what's the deal with those batteries? Can you be confident that a years-old Tesla will still perform well? In general, the answer is yes.

"fuzzy white ball," per NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya, which is being lit up by the Sun - a "cloud of dust and ice called the coma, which is shed by the comet."

I wonder how many of you have reflected on this phenomenon: everything anyone has ever seen, or ever will see, makes up less than 5% of what is out there in the universe. All the people, all the faces, all the mountains, the moon, the stars, the galaxies, supernova-everything we've ever seen-is less than 5%. The rest is in the form of dark matter and dark energy, as yet unknown.

"To find the holes the third star has cut like a knife through the dust, look for the central point of light and trace a V shape from about 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock," NASA says.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health doled out about as much total grant funding in the recently ended fiscal year as they did the year before, despite the Trump administration's "unprecedented" earlier slowdown of federal science funding, Science reported Wednesday. According to the journal'sanalysis, "NSF committed approximately $8.17 billion to grants, fellowships, and other funding mechanisms in the 2025 fiscal year"-which ended Sept. 30-"about the same as in 2024." It found that NIH spending also remained level.

The synthetic tongue is made of a gel that contains milk powder, acrylic acid and choline chloride. When a current is applied to the gel, its chloride and hydrogen ions can conduct electricity because they are mobile. To monitor changes in conductivity, the scientists placed the gel between copper sheets and connected the whole contraption to a workstation that measures the electric current.

The white coating, a porous paint-like material, reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat, making surfaces up to 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air, even under direct sun. This cooler condition allows water vapor in the air to condense like dew on the smooth coating surface, where it can be collected. In a recent test, a roughly 10-square-foot area treated with the coating was able to harvest 1.6 cups of water over the course of single day.

If you don't mind peering through a sheet of glass, you can see a Quantum Computer at IBM's office in Waterloo. Known as the IBM Quantum System One, it is the first circuit-based commercial quantum computer, launched by IBM in January 2019. Quantum computers are capable of using the weird world of quantum physics and simplistically, where a standard computer bit can be either a binary One or Zero, a quantum computer can be both at the same time.

Tony Cheesman, who lives in the seaside town of Penguin, was walking his two dogs, Ronan and Custard, along the beach at Preservation Bay on Friday morning when something silvery and surrounded by gulls grabbed his attention. When I got to it, I saw this massive fish, then I noticed the beautiful colours, and it had these long fans coming out of its chin and the top of its head, he said. I'd never seen anything like it.

A biologist has shared the heartwarming moment he found one of the rarest flowers in the world, breaking down in tears over the discovery. Dr Chris Thorogood, associate professor of biology at the University of Oxford, had trekked day and night through the jungle to hunt for the incredibly rare Rafflesia hasseltii. These elusive plants only grow in the tiger-patrolled jungles of West Sumatra, Indonesia and bloom for only a few days.

'She will come over and act like a little mouse midwife and very carefully, with her mouth and her paws, pull the pup out,' Professor Robert Froemke, from NYU Langone Health, told the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California.