In June 2018, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft and sample return mission Hayabsua-2 arrived at the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu. The first scientific results from the mission, published this week in a trio of papers in the journal Science, portray Ryugu as a porous ‘pile of rubble.’ This …

A team of planetary scientists at the Australian National University found that our planet is made of the same elements as the Sun but has less of the volatile elements such as hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen. Wang et al compared new protosolar elemental abundances with recent estimates of bulk …

Physicists from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN have observed, for the first time, the matter-antimatter asymmetry known as charge-parity (CP) violation in the decays of a D0 meson, a subatomic particle made up of a charm quark and an up antiquark. The LHCb magnet. Image credit: …

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides evidence that sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), a typically solitary species, have the ability to mimic the expressions of their conspecifics and that they do so by matching the exact facial variants they interact with. It is the first time exact …

  The Sun is a relatively quiet G-type star (G2V), but the key word is “relatively.” While it avoids the massive storms known to affect so-called flare stars, it occasionally releases both solar flares and coronal mass ejections. On March 20, NASA detected such a flare with an associated CME. …

  NASA is fast running out of seats on Russian Soyuz capsules, so the long-delayed Commercial Crew Program will soon be the only way to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX is on-target to get its Dragon II capsule ready for crewed flights this summer, …

  Technology has made it easier than ever to create content, be it photos, video, or an angsty Tumblr blog. You might have a device in your pocket right now that can record 4K video at dozens of megabits per second. In 2018, humanity created 33 zettabytes (that’s 33 billion …

  Neural networks have been a hot topic of late, but evaluating the most efficient way to build one for processing a given stack of data is still an arduous affair. Designing systems that can use algorithms to build themselves in the most optimal fashion is still a nascent field …

  Ads are a necessary component of modern technology, but they come with drawbacks even when they aren’t being used to scam people. Some ads in Android apps have been scamming people, though. An investigation by ad analysis firm Protected Media, and Buzzfeed News has found that a popular ad …

  When ATT rebranded its LTE service as “5G E” in certain markets in an attempt to mislead consumers, companies like Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint cried foul, as did users. There’s been little interest in repeating the confusion of the early 4G transition when that moniker was hijacked and used …