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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NASA has drafted its Mars rover Perseverance to help monitor the sun's activity. Every day for the next two months, the rover will image the sun with its Mastcam-Z cameras, capturing crucial information about sunspots and other large features that can give clues to solar activity. Mars is currently passing behind the sun, giving the rover a view of the star's far sidea perspective we can't see from Earth.
The aeronautics company announced Friday that they have discovered a potential vulnerability in the software on board the Airbus A320 during solar storms, which may hinder pilots from steering or stabilizing the plane while in the air. Airbus issued an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT), a global warning that urges all airlines using the A320 passenger jet to immediately update their software and hardware to better protect against radiation interference.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge's cognition and brain sciences unit have used images of roughly 3,800 "neurotypical" brains, ranging in age from birth to 90, to pinpoint these turning points where our brains change shape to serve different functions as we grow, age, and eventually decline. Roughly speaking, ages nine, 32, 66, and 83 mark pivotal shifts in how our brains operate. "This study is the first to identify major phases of brain wiring across a human lifespan," Dr. Alexa Mousley, who led the research, said in a release.
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!
Three minor earthquakes were detected less than 30 miles south of San Jose Friday morning, striking within three minutes of each other between 10.40 and 10.43am ET. The US Geological Survey (USGS) reported that the first tremor registered as a magnitude 3.4 earthquake, and was then followed moments later by magnitude 2.6 and 2.5 quakes. No injuries or damage to local property has been reported at this time.
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.
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.
