Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found strong evidence that the rocky lava world HD 3167 b has an atmosphere, despite circling its star every 24 hours under extreme heat. The surprising discovery could help scientists understand how rocky planets retain atmospheres and what the young, molten Earth may once have looked like.
Earth’s center of mass is constantly on the move, shifting by a few millimeters as enormous amounts of water, ice, and even air migrate around the planet with the seasons. NASA scientists have developed a more precise way to track these tiny swings using laser-ranging satellites, GPS data, and measurements of how water and ice deform Earth’s crust.
The Draconids, one of the year's most unpredictable meteor showers, will peak this week. Although only a few "shooting stars" are expected, the shower has a history of producing spectacular meteor storms with little warning.The Draconid meteor shower takes place Oct. 6-10 each year, peaking on Oct. 8-9, when around 10 "shooting stars" per hour are expected. Whereas most meteor showers are best seen after midnight or during the dark hours before dawn, the best time to view the Draconids is in the evening, according to Timeanddate.com, making it one of the more convenient meteor showers of the year. Just after dark Thursday (Oct. 8) will be the best time to look.The Draconids are different fro...
Anthropic and OpenAI accused Chinese AI developers of mining their models’ answers to train cheaper copycats. Here’s how distillation works and why it’s so hard to stop
Emerging treatments aim to reverse or stall signs of aging in the body and thus cut the risk of age-related diseases. One of those signs is an accumulation of "zombie cells" — damaged cells that spew harmful substances rather than dying off and getting cleared away by the immune system. Some scientists are designing treatments aimed at killing those zombies directly. But what if we instead helped the body's cleanup crew get rid of them?"I think rejuvenating the immune system could rectify a lot of problems," said Roel de Maeyer, an immunologist at the University of Oxford. "We know hospitals are full of older people suffering from infections that younger people don't need to go to [the] hosp...
The patient: A 65-year-old woman in MichiganThe symptoms: The woman arrived at the emergency room via ambulance and asked to see a psychiatrist for her visual hallucinations. "I'm seeing dead people," she told clinicians, adding that she'd even fired a gun at her hallucinations in one instance, according to a report of her case. (The report does not describe what the hallucinations looked like.)Despite this reaction to her hallucinations, she was calm and alert during her physical exam, with normal vital signs other than high blood pressure. She reported a history of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart failure and chronic back pain but no prior psychiatric history.What happened next: Since ...
Behind the headlines about AI agents lies a deeper debate over accountability, safety and control.
Scientists at UC San Francisco have developed a way to create cancer-fighting CAR-T cells directly inside the body, potentially avoiding the slow and extremely expensive process of removing, engineering, and reinfusing a patient’s immune cells. Using a two-particle delivery system, the researchers sent CRISPR gene-editing tools and new cancer-targeting DNA specifically into T cells, where the DNA was inserted at a precise location in the genome.
The prize recognizes Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai’s discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis
Ozone pollution caused by Amazon wildfires is significantly reducing the rainforest's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, new research reveals. Ground-level ozone is formed when pollutants from sources such as wildfires react in the presence of sunlight. This harms human health and interferes with plants' ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
The animal kingdom has influenced several robot designs over the years to solve fundamental challenges in propulsion and movement — from horses to insects. Now, frogs are the latest creatures to inspire roboticists. As seen in a new study published Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances, researchers probed how twisting bent elastic rods could produce a "snapping motion" that enabled a small robot to hop or swim. This mechanism could be used to improve robots with limited power and ones that need to traverse rough terrain and even water, the scientists said in the study. They also built a prototype to demonstrate the work. The palm-sized robot weighs just 3.4 ounces, or about as much as a d...
Some flowers have petals with small semitranslucent sections. Research in New Phytologist reveals that these "windows" alter the amount of light and heat entering the flower and create conditions that influence microbial abundance.