Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.
Pelicans have resided in St James's Park, London, for 360 years. But the current flock has been a summer sensation because of the first chicks to hatch in the park's history.
Ichthyosaurs ruled the oceans for 150 million years during the Mesozoic Era. Their fish-shaped bodies were built for high speeds. In that context, it is normally an advantage to be as light as possible.
As a liquid that is easily stored and transported, ammonia (NH3) is an attractive carrier for hydrogen, which is used in fuel cells, semiconductor manufacturing, chemical processing and other applications. However, breaking ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen typically requires high temperatures, and the resulting gas mixture must undergo additional purification before the hydrogen can be used in many applications.
Caring for others without caring for oneself is associated with lower levels of well-being and may not be sustainable, a new study found.
A bizarre squid has been filmed haunting the northeastern Pacific Ocean for the first time. Researchers spotted the bigfin squid (Magnapinna) via remote video while using an uncrewed submersible to explore underwater mountains, known as seamounts, at a depth of more than 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) off the coast of California. The footage, captured Aug. 7, represents the first confirmed live observation of a bigfin squid in the northeastern Pacific, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), whose scientists made the discovery with collaborators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).Olívia Soares Pereira, a deep-sea ecologist and postdoctoral ...
For decades, researchers wondered if the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe fluid flow, break down. OpenAI put thousands of agents on the question.
Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, had just spent months working on what he believed could be a life-defining mathematical proof. Then, during a Sept. 6 meeting with OpenAI employees, he claims that he was issued a stark warning: "Why would you ruin your career?"That exchange, which Buckmaster described in a detailed public statement this week, sits at the heart of a ballooning controversy around a famous set of mathematical equations called Navier-Stokes. OpenAI says its artificial intelligence (AI) model has solved an outstanding problem tied to this 200-year-old set of fluid dynamics equations. The set of equations appears on the list of one of the seven Millenniu...
Abnormally high temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau triggered two catastrophic rainfall events halfway around the world in California and nearby states in early 2017 and 2023, a new study reports.This is the first time that researchers have identified this link, known as a climate teleconnection. The results could improve forecasts of extreme weather in the western U.S., which, in turn, could improve warnings for coastal communities and potentially save lives as well as billions of dollars in property damage, the study's authors say.In December 2016 and February 2023, the Tibetan Plateau was warmer than usual for these times of the year. Roughly one month after each of these hotspots appeare...
The world's oldest known habitual drug use can be traced to an island in Indonesia, where ice age hunter-gatherers sucked on betel nuts — palm seeds that contain a neuroactive substance, a new study finds. Scientists made the discovery after studying strange grooves in the teeth of two prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The deep grooves were caused by regularly sucking on betel nuts (Areca catechu), likely for relief from the pain of toothache, according to the study, which was published Wednesday (Sept. 9) in the journal Science Advances.The partial skeletons of the two people were found on the island of Sulawesi, but their lives were separated in time by thousands of years. One of them, a man w...
Gondwana was much bigger than we thought, according to the new analysis
Astronomers just dropped a video 27 years in the making: the highest-definition animation of a gargantuan black hole jet blasting out of a distant galaxy and twisting off into space.The video, made from 116 images taken between 1995 and 2022, captured a blazar known as 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules. A blazar is a sort of quasar — a bright, feeding supermassive black hole embedded in the center of a faraway galaxy — that emits huge jets of gas into its environment. The jets blaze at nearly the speed of light and are charged with highly concentrated X-rays and gamma rays.As described in an Aug. 26 study in the journal Nature, scientists gathered the images of 3C 345 using decades of ob...
Shingrix, the same vaccine that protects people from the blistering shingles rash, might also lower risk of heart disease.
It’s unclear what these objects actually are, but evidence for them has been detected by NASA’s Chandra space telescope for years
Related storiesNext-generation AI 'swarms' will invade social media by mimicking human behavior and harassing real users, researchers warn'A dangerous proposition': How AI is warping the social fabric and the ways we collectively imagine the future'There's a sense that these algorithms are objective and they get to know you': How social media warps our understanding of healthcareArtificial intelligence (AI) systems can now hold conversations, reason through difficult mathematical equations, and respond in ways that seem more human. As AI grows more advanced, the question is shifting from the realm of science fiction to scientific debate. A recent preprint study examined "consciousness steeri...
It can't be heard, but different parts of the human body are in constant conversation, communicating to keep the entire system running efficiently. For biologists, being able to listen in on this discussion is a long-sought-after goal. Over the years, researchers have caught snippets of these exchanges, but the complete dialogue has remained out of reach.
A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars ignited—literally the "let there be light" moment for the universe. Now known to astronomers as Population III, or Pop III, stars, these giants were very different from the stars we know today. They formed from pristine hydrogen and helium, with almost no "metal" (i.e., other elements) holding them back. They were also huge, growing to tens to hundreds of times larger than the sun. And they died young, in many cases collapsing into the universe's earliest black holes.
Teeth and bone fragments unearthed in a cave in China, along with animal bones and stone tools, help paint a picture of Denisovan life.
Archaeologists excavating in southwestern China have discovered a cave that was used by Denisovans for more than 100,000 years. Five human fossils, scores of stone tools, and hundreds of animal bones recovered from the cave reveal for the first time that the enigmatic Denisovans thrived in a forested environment where they hunted and ate large game animals.Denisovans were a lineage of humans who lived in Asia and went extinct around 30,000 years ago. Ancient DNA has shown that Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens) are distantly related and that all three groups interbred in the past. But while archaeologists have found numerous Neanderthal and modern-human skeletons, Deni...
An analysis of ancient bones found in a Chinese cave offer glimpses of how Denisovans lived more than 130,000 years ago
Cleaner engine standards and a gradual uptake of electric vehicles have been credited with helping improve Auckland's air quality in recent years.