It’s tempting to think that the “plink” sound produced by a falling water droplet on a liquid surface is caused by the droplet itself, but new research points to an unexpected source of this familiar, yet annoying, sound. Excitingly, the researchers have also identified a neat hack to stop it.
Private space company Blue Origin announced that it plans to sell suborbital spaceflight tickets to aspiring space tourists starting next year. No price was given, but the company said it expects to conduct the first passenger tests of the New Shepard launch system “soon.”
For the past two weeks, a massive dust storm has churned on Mars, forcing NASA to put its Opportunity rover into hibernation mode. But Curiosity, a rover on the other side of the planet, is now feeling the effects of the storm as well, revealing the dramatic, planet-size scale of this dusty weather system.
There’s a new docudrama coming out tomorrow about the life of Ulugh Beg, an obscure medieval astronomer who made Samarkand, now Uzbekistan, a thriving center of culture and science in the 15th century.
Koko, arguably the world’s most famous gorilla, has died at the age of 46. Known for her ability to communicate through sign language, Koko forever changed our conceptions of primate intelligence and emotional capacities.
Bird parents, like many human mothers and fathers, often struggle to become empty nesters. But as new research suggests, the tension that arises between baby birds who don’t want to leave the nest and parents who would very much like them out ultimately results in an ideal departure time that boosts survival rates.
Current prosthetic limbs aren’t yet capable of transmitting complex sensations like texture or pain to the user, but a recent breakthrough by scientists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in which a synthetic layer of skin on an artificial hand transmitted feelings of pain directly to the user, takes us one step…
Ötzi the Iceman is the gift that keeps on giving. Found embedded in a glacier in 1991, the 5,300-year-old mummy has offered unprecedented insights into Copper Age Europe. A new analysis of Ötzi’s equipment shows what he was up to in the hours before an archer drove an arrow straight into his back.
It was 50 years ago this month that Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed by an assassin. In what is now the first study of its kind, a team of specialists has conducted a systematic review of the medical care he received during the critical hours following the shooting. Their findings offer unprecedented details about…
Earlier today, President Donald Trump said he’ll be directing the Pentagon to create the US Space Force, which would become the sixth independent branch of the US military. The move is meant to help the US keep pace with its rivals, but experts question the need for an entirely new military wing.
Meet DeepCube, an artificially intelligent system that’s as good at playing the Rubik’s Cube as the best human master solvers. Incredibly, the system learned to dominate the classic 3D puzzle in just 44 hours and without any human intervention.
After a 20-day journey, China’s Queqiao lunar communications relay satellite has made it to lunar orbit. Its companion, the Longjiang-2 microsatellite, wasted no time, taking some neat pics of Earth and the lunar surface.
There are eight planets in our Solar System (sorry Pluto), but collectively, these planets host over 175 moons, one or two of which may even harbor life. Indeed, our galaxy, based on what we observe here, could be bursting with exomoons, a significant number of which may be capable of fostering life, according to new…
It’s been over six weeks since lava fissures began erupting on Hawaii’s Big Island, and there’s still no end in sight. New videos taken by the US Geological Survey reveal the dramatic extent to which the encroaching lava has reshaped the surrounding landscape, turning once gorgeous beaches into a smoldering pile of…
The US Government Accountability Office released a scathing report in May claiming that NASA’s most expensive projects have “deteriorated” significantly in the past year both in terms of added costs and scheduling delays. Earlier today, NASA had to explain itself in front of a Congressional subcommittee, where it…
The extraordinary discovery of four small frogs preserved in amber is providing the earliest evidence of these now-prolific amphibians living in tropical rainforests.
Since the 1990s, scientists have detected thousands of exoplanets orbiting distant stars, but the discovery of baby protoplanets embedded within stellar expanses of gas and dust has proven to be a challenge. An international team of astronomers has used a new technique to finally discover not one, but three infant…
Ever looked at a picture of the supercontinent Pangea and wondered where your current address would have been 250 million years ago? A new interactive map provides this very service, allowing you to see modern locations across 750 million years of our planet’s history.
There are currently about 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth—enough to blow our planet to kingdom come. It’s complete overkill, literally. But how many nukes is enough to deter an enemy? And how many nukes could an aggressor nation drop on an enemy before the effects of nuclear winter come back to haunt them? A new…
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible.
