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.
This super-heavy version of New Glenn will feature nine of the company's rocket engines on the booster stage, and four on the upper stage. That's up from seven and two, respectively, on the current version, which Blue Origin says will continue to fly alongside the super-heavy variant. Blue Origin is now referring to the two versions as New Glenn 9×4 and New Glenn 7×2.
While much of the history of life on Earth is written, the opening chapters are murky at best. On our ever-changing world, the older a rock is, the more it has changed, obscuring or even erasing evidence of ancient life. Beyond a hazy boundary of circa two billion years, in fact, this interference is so total that no pristine, unaltered Earth rocks are known to exist, making any potential sign of biology as clear as mud. At least until now.
New research published in the journal Science suggests this protoplanet was actually a close neighbor of the early Earth, and formed somewhere between our homeworld and the sun. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Theia: Space forensics analyzing a billion-year-old murder The findings from a study led by researchers
Scott Tilley, a satellite researcher based out of British Colombia, uncovered evidence that some 171 SpaceX-built Starshield satellites have been broadcasting signals in the wrong direction, according to Ars Technica. The satellites were operated as part of the US government's National Reconnaissance Office surveillance program, which is meant to expand the country's ability to spy over other nations. According to Ars, Tilley discovered the SpaceX satellites were using a frequency which is internationally designated for Earth-to-space and space-to-space transmissions.
Although the plant is inedible, researchers say the findings could be important for space exploration. Dr Tomomichi Fujita, the lead author of the study, from Hokkaido University in Japan, said: While moss may not be on the menu, its resilience offers insights into developing sustainable life-support systems in space. Mosses could help with oxygen generation, humidity control or even soil formation.
They say the Goatman prowls the woods at night near my home in Maryland. He was once a biologist named Stephen Fletcher at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. That was before the accident with goat DNA transformed him into a half-­human, half-­goat monster who devours victims that he slays with an axe. It's been decades since I first heard of the Goatman.
"We figured out that if you do that, you're going to miss the eclipses, and we know they didn't. They made internal adjustments. We think they'd restart the table midway. When you do that, you go from having missed eclipses to having none. You would never miss an eclipse. So it's not a calculated predictive table, it's a calculated predictive table plus adjustments based on empirical observations over time."
Not everyone appreciates the artistry of Jackson Pollock's famous drip paintings, with some dismissing them as something any child could create. While Pollock's work is undeniably more sophisticated than that, it turns out that when one looks at splatter paintings made by adults and young children through a fractal lens and compares them to those of Pollock himself, the children's work does bear a closer resemblance to Pollock's than those of the adults.
The results appeared in the Science on 20 November . "This is probably the clearest demonstration of the neural pathways responsible for magnetic processing in any animal," says Eric Warrant, a sensory biology researcher at the University of Lund in Sweden. Studies have suggested that various animals, including turtles, trout and robins, can sense the direction and strength of magnetic fields, although the evidence has sometimes been contested - and the mechanisms have remained controversial.
In their system, the engineers use ultrasonic waves to shake the water out of the material that can absorb moisture from the air. This said material is an ultrasonic actuator made of a flat ceramic ring, which receives the electricity during vibrations. In their research, the team learned that this vibration can break the weak connection between the water molecules and the sorbent, so when the waves hit the flat ceramic ring and the system, the water inside it loosens and falls out as droplets,
Researchers and scientific journals can add a new possibility to a growing list of artificial intelligence-generated horrors: letters to the editor. Two days after researchers published a paper on the efficacy of ivermectin as a treatment for malaria in the New England Journal of Medicine this summer, the journal received a letter to the editor from another researcher criticizing the paper's findings.
Time is running out for the venerable NASA observatory. In September, the agency reckoned there was a 50 percent chance of an uncontrolled reentry by mid-2026, increasing to 90 percent by the end of the year. Although the spacecraft was launched in 2004, it remains operational and could continue to capture data on gamma-ray bursts if boosted to a higher orbit.
A single multipurpose gene-editing tool can correct several genetic conditions by restoring proteins that have been truncated by disease-causing mutations. The method might one day overcome a key stumbling block faced by gene-editing therapies: the need to design a bespoke treatment for each disease. The new approach, called PERT, combines gene editing with engineered RNA molecules that allow protein synthesis to continue even when a mutation in the DNA tells it to stop prematurely.
Last week, news emerged that the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft docked to China's Tiangong space station had sustained serious damage, likely due to space debris. The capsule was meant to allow a crew of three astronauts to return to Earth on November 5, but thanks to "tiny cracks" in the "return capsule's viewport window," the Shenzhou-20 crew had to return home on the Shenzhou-21 shuttle that delivered their replacements to the station instead, safely landing in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region last week.
Mysterious mental misfires are not random and, in many cases, predictable and avoidable. Once you understand the neuroscience behind these common tasks, the confusion evaporates, and you can avoid the self-doubt and humiliation that often come from what we sometimes conclude are examples of individual stupidity. What appears to be a personal flaw is actually just your ancient brain navigating a modern world.
A comet, dubbed C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), spectacularly broke apart into three huge chunks and anybody with an eight-inch telescope or bigger can catch the resulting fireworks show for the next several weeks, according to Sky & Telescope. The comet shouldn't be confused with interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. K1/ATLAS originated from within the furthest stretches of the solar system, and not interstellar space. Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope 2.0 Project, which allows public access to remotely-controlled telescopes,
In brief, circular (3-mm diameter) craniotomies were centred over ALM (2.5 mm anterior and 1.5 mm lateral from Bregma). We expressed the soma-targeted opsin ST-ChrimsonR in excitatory neurons by injecting a virus (10 12 titre; AAV2/2 camKII-KV2.1-ChrimsonR-FusionRed; Addgene, plasmid, catalogue no. 102771) into the craniotomy, 400 µm below the dura (five to ten sites, 20-30 nl each), centred in the craniotomy and spaced by approximately 500 μm between injection sites.
The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, reveal that, far from being a recent human cultural invention, kissing is an ancient trait deeply rooted in our biology. This is the first time anyone has taken a broad evolutionary lens to examine kissing. Our findings add to a growing body of work highlighting the remarkable diversity of sexual behaviors exhibited by our primate cousins, said Matilda Brindle, lead author of the study and an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Biology at Oxford, in a statement.
Brindle and her colleagues, Catherine Talbot of the Florida Institute of Technology and Stuart West of Oxford, wanted to evaluate kissing from an evolutionary perspective. So they searched through past studies for modern examples of primates smooching, defined rather unromantically as non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer. They found that just like humans, great apes kiss for a variety of reasons, from conveying sexual desire to indicating friendly, affectionate feelings.
Science@Cal is proud to present a series of free public science lectures on the third Saturday of every month. These talks are given by renowned UC Berkeley scientists and aimed at general audiences. Talks take place on the UC Berkeley campus at 11 am. Doors open thirty minutes before the talk and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Each talk is planned to last an hour, plus time for at least a few questions at the end.
Most of us have strong opinions about what those words mean, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that "smart" and "dumb" are slippery, subjective constructs. What seems smart to one person may strike another as naive, arrogant, or shortsighted. Worse still, our own perception of what's smart can shift over time. Yesterday's clever decision can look like today's regrettable blunder.
