Ornithologists have discovered a new genus and species of tanager on the lower slopes of the Andes in southeastern Peru and western Bolivia. The Inti tanager (Heliothraupis oneilli). Image credit: Louisiana State University / Lane et al., doi: 10.1093/ornithology/ukab059. Tanagers are a large family, Thraupidae, of more than 370 songbird …

Perseverance and Ingenuity landed on Mars almost exactly nine months ago. Over that time, both vehicles have already expanded our understanding of Mars, which will only increase over time as both vehicles will continue to conduct further experiments in the months and years to come. Perseverance is a rover based …

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is built for extremes. It’s the fastest spacecraft they’ve ever built, and it orbits closer to the sun than any other artificial object. As it spirals inward for ever-closer views of our local star, it also encounters specs of space dust. Traveling at such incredible speeds …

Getting into space is hard, and one of the reasons is that it takes a lot of energy to break free of Earth’s gravity. So far, the only way we’ve found to do that reliably is with rockets, but a startup called SpinLaunch has something else in mind. Using a …

Ingenuity’s mission on Mars has been a resounding success, but it is not without its emergent challenges; reports have returned from the space copter’s latest exploits, and things are getting tough out there. This fall, we experienced solar conjunction with Mars, where the two planets line up on exactly opposite …

Virtual reality (VR) is a new, immersive medium with under-tapped potential. Though most commonly thought of in the context of personal entertainment, the rising applications of virtual reality stretch across industries that include automotives, education, aerospace and defense, and healthcare. The global VR industry has been estimated at US$18 billion …

For more than a year, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a societal challenge: It affects us all, but it affects us differently. Like other societal challenges, such as the climate crisis, economic inequality, and racial injustice, it magnifies old and new social problems and brutally exposes weaknesses in our systems. …

The African Telecommunications Union (ATU) has extended the deadline for submission of entries to the ATU Africa Innovation Challenge 2021, to August 31, 2021. Following a consultative meeting with Challenge partners, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Huawei Technologies Limited and Intel Corporation, the move was arrived at to expand room …

The Shelley’s eagle owl (Bubo shelleyi) was photographed by Imperial College London researcher Joseph Tobias and freelance ecologist Robert Williams on October 16, 2021 in Ghana. The Shelley’s eagle owl (Bubo shelleyi). Image credit: Robert Williams. The Shelley’s eagle owl is a large species of owl found in the rainforests …

Cell classes are the building blocks for the central nervous system. It is widely believed that major classes of neurons have been identified in the retina, although some types have not been fully characterized. The newly-discovered retinal neurons don’t fit into any existing mammalian retinal cell class. An image of …