Science

Science

A tawny owl screeches nearby in the dark and her mate replies, hooting eerily from the forest below. A white dome floats in the gloaming above a plain black doorway outlined with red light, like a portal to another dimension. I'm in Grizedale Forest, far from any light-polluting cities, to visit the Lake District's first public observatory and planetarium, which opened in May.

"The lapse \"resulted in NIST UTC [universal coordinated time] being 4.8 microseconds slower than it should have been,\" NIST spokesperson Rebecca Jacobson said in an email. That's just under 5 millionths of a second. To understand just how brief an instant that is, Jacobson noted that it takes a person about 350,000 microseconds to blink."

The, the degree to which Starshipis a revolutionary technology is not well understood in the world. "It's the first time that there's been any rocket design, where full rapid reusability is possible - well, full reusability at all is possible, or full reusability at all is possible," Musk's word salad continued. "This is the first design where a reusable rocket is one of the possible - with success - is one of the possible outcomes."

With the use of a bootstrap experimental setup consisting of a large polystyrene ball, a curved computer monitor, and a small straw that dispenses sugar water, Tóth managed to teach a rat how to play the classic 1994 video game Doom II. The rat's movements translated into rotations of the ball, which were then translated into movement inside the iconic first-person shooter. The sugar water served as a treat whenever the rat completed a milestone, like walking down a corridor.

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception. The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun

Military weapons are often introduced with bold promises like greater efficiency, revolutionary design, and battlefield dominance on paper. But war has a way of stripping those promises down to their essentials. When weapons leave testing ranges and enter real combat, factors like dirt, stress, logistics, and human error quickly expose weaknesses that no specification sheet can predict, or any human for that matter. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a look at some of these weapons that did not hold up under the pressures of combat.

The roughly Jupiter-mass object, designated PSR J2322-2650b, orbits just one million miles away from its star, or one percent of the Earth's distance from the Sun, with a single "year" lasting just 7.8 Earth hours. And at such proximity, the extreme gravity of the star - an exotic type known as a pulsar - pulls the entire planet into an oblong shape, like a lemon or a football.

In the days leading up to the winter solstice, amber streetlights switch on ever earlier as dusk falls over Flagstaff, Ariz., casting the city in a soft, warm hue. Longer nights mean even more time to spend under hundreds of stars and the cloudy swath of the Milky Way galaxy, which are visible even from the city's downtown. Spectacular views of the night sky are a given for the more than 77,000 residents of the world's first and largest dark sky city,

In 1978, NASA researcher Donald Kessler and his colleagues published a paper titled "Collision frequency of artificial satellites: The creation of a debris belt." The paper laid down a grim warning: a single collision between satellites that would escalate into a series of followup accidents, "each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth." "Under certain conditions, the belt could begin to form within this century and could be a significant problem during the next century," the prescient paper warned.

The culprits are meteorites, or as the Indigenous Moqoit (Mocovi) people call them, gifts from the sky. The Piguem N'onaxa (Campo del Cielo, or Field of the Sky) Reserve is a provincial park in the town of Gancedo, Chaco. It is a protected area within a larger zone where, more than 4,000 years ago, a giant meteor, believed to have weighed about 800 tons roughly the weight of five blue whales fell.

Day 20 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: The Cosmic Cliffs. The James Webb Space Telescope peered inside a region at the edge of a gigantic gaseous cavity within the star cluster NGC 3324. The cluster, about 9,100 light-years away, near the Carina Nebula, is believed to be fairly young, only about 12 million years old.

On a grey day in early June, a commercial plane landed at Norfolk Island Airport in the South Pacific. Onboard was precious cargo ferried some 1,700km from Sydney: four blue plastic crates with LIVE ANIMALS signs affixed to the outside. Inside were thumbnail-sized snails, hundreds of them, with delicate, keeled shells. The molluscs' arrival was the culmination of an ambitious plan five years in the making: to bring a critically endangered species back from the brink.

I'll stop the world and melt with youYou've seen the differenceAnd it's getting better all the timeThere's nothing you and I won't do I'll stop the world and melt with you So is it right? If we stop the planet (let's assume this means halting Earth's spin), will it melt? Amazingly, we can figure this out. The key here is the amount of energy it would take to literally stop the world.

In this episode: 1:58 Evidence of ancient brine on an asteroid Samples taken from the asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft suggest the parent body it originated from is likely to have contained salty, subsurface water. This finding provides insights into the chemistry of the early Solar System, and suggests that brines might have been an important place where pre-biotic molecules were formed.

Several new rockets made their first flights this year. Blue Origin's New Glenn was the most notable debut, with a successful inaugural launch in January followed by an impressive second flight in November, culminating in the booster's first landing on an offshore platform. Second on the list is China's Zhuque-3, a partially reusable methane-fueled rocket developed by the quasi-commercial launch company LandSpace. The medium-lift Zhuque-3 successfully reached orbit on its first flight earlier this month, and its booster narrowly missed landing downrange.

After decades of research and experimentation, quantum is shifting from discovery to deployment, and the coming year will be critical for stepping up delivery on a world‑class quantum network by 2035, according to a research note by BT. Furthermore, said Gabriela Styf Sjoman, the firm's managing director of research and network strategy, the UK's next phase of quantum progress hinges on building quantum-ready and quantum-secure networks.

Offshore wind farms may do more than boost renewable energy: they might support marine ecosystems, too. That's the takeaway of a new study conducted in China. The researchers found that wind turbines provided support for colonies of oysters and barnacles and that fish species and biomass were more abundant near the turbines than they were in an area without the machines.

"Engineers at [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] meticulously plan each day of the rover's activities on Mars,"

In the early morning hours of Friday, December 19, you could spot the visitor from another solar system in the sky with a serious telescope, that is. Comet 3I/ATLAS flew by Earth at a distance of 270 million kilometers (168 million miles). That was its closest approach to our planet. From here, the comet will continue its journey and pass by Jupiter in early 2026 before crossing the orbits of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune by 2028 and then leaving our solar system.

Sources told the publication that a team in Shenzhen completed the prototype of an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine earlier this year and it is allegedly now undergoing testing. The EUV machine was reportedly made by former engineers from Dutch semiconductor supplier ASML. Reuters states that China is targeting production of its own EUV chips beginning in 2028, although other experts have projected 2030 as a more likely date.

The human brain has 86 billion neurons connected by roughly 100 trillion synapses, making it one of the most complex objects in the known universe. Each year neuroscientists make fascinating, important and downright strange discoveries about how this resilient structure works, and 2025 didn't disappoint. Here are 10 of the most fascinating brain discoveries of this year for your own brain to noodle on.

What does it take to become the best at something? The answer may not lie in early childhood practice or in lifelong, laser-focused dedication. Instead the path to becoming exceptional at a skill might look a lot more like meandering. That's according to a new paper, published today in Science, that seeks to untangle what it takes to excel across different disciplines, from sports to chess to classical music.

Some cycads warm up their reproductive organs to attract specially equipped pollinating beetles in the dark.

So evolution, what it really means is change over time. So we wanna know how that change occurs over time. And there's two dimensions to this process, and it kind of works like a staircase. And one process is mutation, and that's the rise in the staircase. Those occur by chance. If mutation didn't happen, all things would be identical. So you need mutation to make individuals different from one another.