The only major difference between the sun and the stars we see at night is that the sun happens to be close to uswhich is advantageous, assuming you enjoy being alive. Astronomers enjoy this as well but have another reason for rejoicing in the sun's proximity: this allows us to see it as a disk. The sun is, of course, three-dimensional.
More than 2,000 years ago, pretty much every educated human knew the Earth was round. There are some pretty obvious clues, after all. If you travel south, you see stars and constellations you've never seen before (because they're blocked by Earth's curvature). When a ship comes into port, you see the top of it before the bottom (because the ocean surface is curved). Finally, when Earth's shadow falls on the moon in a lunar eclipse, the shadow is a circle. I mean, c'mon!
There are some major problems facing humanity in the 21st century, and they're all going to require an enormous investment of our collective resources if we want to solve them. From climate change to global pandemics to the energy and water crises and more, none of these problems are going to solve themselves. If they're to be solved at all, it's going to come down to humanity's collective actions.
After two years of experimentation, the material was finally right: a particular mix of thermoplastics and fibreglass that is strong, has no need of extra coating to protect it from sunlight, and is resistant to fouling and marine growth. The perfect base, says Mr Logtenberg, from which to 3D print a boat. Boats need to withstand the unforgiving nature of the marine environment.
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Ever since I first read Janine Benyus's Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, I've descended into a rabbit hole in search of what " intelligence " really means (and who has it). Perhaps that's why I love the name of this newsletter so much. [It's a worm, after all. A humble, indispensable critter buried beneath the soil.] Benyus's central argument is that the "smartest" solutions to human problems already exist in nature. We just need to know where, and how, to look for them. (For instance: wind turbines inspired by humpback whales.)
The European Space Agency's long-delayed Rosalind Franklin rover has received a boost with confirmation that NASA is staying in the project. During Director General Josef Achbacher's speech at the agency's Ministerial meeting, where funding is debated and projects proposed and selected, he said [PDF]: "Just yesterday, I received very good news from NASA to confirm their contribution to the Rosalind Franklin Mission."
In 2019, shortly after finishing her master's at Nanjing University in China, Xinyi Zhao opened an e-mail to learn that she had been offered a PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. "When I told my parents, they asked me to double-check whether the offer was real, as they weren't familiar with the institute." But Zhao knew of its glowing scientific reputation.
Melting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could save the Gulf Stream, a remarkable new study reveals. The vast icy mass in the southern hemisphere contains around 750,000 cubic miles of ice - enough to fill Wembley Stadium nearly three billion times. As it melts, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sends salty water towards the North Atlantic, which helps the water stay dense enough to keep the crucial ocean current moving, the study authors reveal.
In the study, they tracked 121 adults aged between 18 and 50 and split them into two groups. All underwent cardiovascular fitness tests and were quizzed about their lifestyle. Two days later, all participants then gave blood samples and had an electroencephalographic (EEG) scan to record the electrical activity of the brain. The first group then did sets of weight exercises of moderate difficulty, while the other was asked to watch a video of adults performing resistance exercises. The resistance exercises lasted for 42 minutes.
Starting on November 27, a global team of scientists with the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) will kick off a two-month campaign to track the comet as it nears our planet. 'While it poses no threat, comet 3I/ATLAS presents a great opportunity for the IAWN community to perform an observing exercise due to its prolonged observability from Earth and high interest to the scientific community,' the UN explains on its website.
Kiira Motors Corporation has concluded a 1,771-kilometre electric coach run across Tanzania along its journey on the Made in Uganda Grand Trans-Africa Electric Expedition, which is offering the company a detailed set of observations on long-distance electric coach operation in East African conditions. The company was founded a few years ago and is owned by the State of Uganda. It focuses on the development of zero emission vehicles.
Most Americans think of turkeys in November, but for wild turkeys, the real drama unfolds in spring, when breeding season transforms forests and fields into complex social arenas filled with high-stakes courtship. During this time, male turkeys, or toms, display a striking combination of physical traits and behaviors to attract females, including gobbling calls, fanned tails, sharp spurs, hair-like beards on their chests, and the elongated snood draping over their beak, which research shows is a key factor in female choice.
A 2025 study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, surveyed more than a thousand college students to find out how they thought food affects their sleep and dreams. About 40% said certain foods make their sleep better or worse. Only 5.5% said food changes their dreams, which suggests there is not one surefire, nightmare-inducing snack, so much as sensitive people whose guts and sleep are tightly linked.
A Florida archaeologist's decades-long persistence has helped solve one of Peru's most puzzling geographical conundrums: the origin and purpose of the so-called Band of Holes in the country's mountainous Pisco Valley. Charles Stanish, professor of archaeology at the University of South Florida, and an expert on Andean culture, spent years studying the more than 5,200 curious hillside shallow pits known to local residents as Monte Sierpe - serpent mountain.
The Soyuz 5 rocket, also named Irtysh for a river that flows through Russia and Kazakhstan, answers to that purpose. Its first stage is powered by a single RD-171MV engine, which at sea level has three times the thrust of a single Raptor 3 engine, and is part of a family of engines that are the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engines in the world. The RD-171MV uses only Russian components.
The molecular mechanisms that enable memories to persist over long timescales from days to weeks and months are still poorly understood1. Here, to develop insights into this process, we created a behavioural task in which mice formed multiple memories but only consolidated some, while forgetting others, over the span of weeks. We then monitored circuit-specific molecular programs that diverged between consolidated and forgotten memories. We identified multiple distinct waves of transcription, that is, cellular macrostates, in the thalamocortical circuit that defined memory persistence.
NASA and Boeing are now targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, the space agency said. Launching by next April will require completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities, NASA added in a statement. "NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in a statement.
As humans, we all want the same thing, a life that's full of good experiences, more time with family, with friends, more time to love, but sometimes genetic illness can cut that short or really, for all of us at some point, our body breaks down. And our bodies are genetic machines. For many diseases, the cause of the disease is a mutation in the genome. Gene therapy is a vision that many have had for decades, more than 50 years.
Consciousness does not emerge from human brains, according to Professor Maria Strømme, a professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University. Instead, she claims that it exists as a fundamental field. If this is correct, 'mysterious' phenomena such as telepathy, near-death experiences, and even life after death could finally be explained by science. According to Professor Strømme's theory, consciousness does not end when we die. Instead, when a person passes away, their consciousness simply returns to the background field.
Beagles are very popular companion dogs and also very popular among breeding facilities and research laboratories where they live highly compromised lives, all "in the name of research" to help humans. 1 Many, if not most people, have no idea what goes on behind these closed doors. I've often wondered why these wonderful dogs rather than others wound up being used for a sorts of research, and now I know because of Dr. Brad Bolman's excellent new book Lab Dog.
There's a fairy tale about Thanksgiving that gets refuted every fall. Does eating turkey really make you fall asleep? When science writers check in with the experts, they always get the same response: No, no, no, and no. Also no and no. These holiday debunkers tell you what the science says: Turkey meat is not a sedative. They tell you what the studies show: Drumsticks don't produce fatigue.
So it was with interest that I learned that urban raccoons in North America are showing signs of domestication. A study in Frontiers in Zoology suggests that the animals are evolving to be as the mainstream media puts it cuter and more pet-like. Jump ahead three thought bubbles and I'm picturing me, holding paws with my new pet, skipping through the daisies to the tune of Daydream Believer. But could this really be?
Many dog breeds are noted for their personalities and behavioral traits, from the distinctive vocalizations of huskies to the herding of border collies. People have worked to identify the genes associated with many of these behaviors, taking advantage of the fact that dogs can interbreed. But that creates its own experimental challenges, as it can be difficult to separate some behaviors from physical traits distinctive to the breed-small dog breeds may seem more aggressive simply because they feel threatened more often.
Sixteen years ago a group of anthropologists discovered 3.4-million-year-old fossilized foot bones in Ethiopia. While they suspected the foot belonged to an ancient human that likely lived alongside the species we know as Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, without a skull or teeth to analyze, they couldn't be sure. What they did know is that unlike Lucy, which walked upright on arched feet like our own, the mystery foot had a grasping toe that was adapted for climbing trees.
He was thrilled; this was the first leopard seal he'd ever seen in Chile, where he is from. As he peered through his binoculars, he noticed another, smaller seal: a pup. "I got so excited, and then we got there, and it's dead," he said. As the boat drew nearer, he could see the pup was still haloed in downy white hairs, suggesting it was less than a week old. Its head was submerged and its limp body was frozen to the ice.
In a statement, NASA revealed that it agreed to modify Boeing's existing 2014 Commercial Crew contract to have Starliner carry cargo only for its first operational flight, Starliner-1, which is tentatively scheduled for "no earlier than April 2026." "Following Starliner certification, and a successful Starliner-1 mission, Starliner will fly up to three crew rotations to the International Space Station," NASA's statement reads.
As per the company, "the Starbase team plans to have the next Super Heavy booster stacked in December, which puts it on pace with the test schedule planned for the first Starship V3 vehicle and associated ground systems." SpaceX then announced that Starship V3's maiden flight is still expected to happen early next year. "Starship's twelfth flight test remains targeted for the first quarter of 2026," the company wrote in its post on X.
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.
