Science

A new analysis of data collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1997 has found strong evidence that the underground ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa may be venting plumes of water vapor above the icy shell. The results appear in the journal Nature Astronomy. Artist’s illustration of Jupiter and Europa with …

Paleontologists have discovered a fossil of a 180-million-year-old crocodyliform that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some ancient crocodiles to dolphin-like creatures. An artist’s impression of Magyarosuchus fitosi. Image credit: Marton Szabo. Dubbed Magyarosuchus fitosi, the ancient crocodile lived during the Early Jurassic epoch in …

A new review, published this month in the Addiction, the official journal of the Society for the Study of Addiction, shows that in 2015 alcohol and tobacco use between them cost the human population more than a quarter of a billion disability-adjusted life years, with illicit drugs costing a further …

The Mars Helicopter, a technology demonstration that will travel to the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, will attempt controlled flight in the thin Martian atmosphere. NASA’s Mars Helicopter. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. “Exploring the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars Helicopter exemplifies a successful marriage of science and …

A Bell test, named for the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, is a randomized trial that compares observations against the philosophical worldview of local realism, in which the properties of the physical world are independent of our observation of them and no signal travels faster than light. On November …

SpaceX is preparing to launch the final planned iteration of its Falcon 9 rocket. If the Block 5 launch and recovery are successful (the launch is currently scheduled for today, May 11), it’ll be a huge step forward for Musk’s reusable rockets — and clear the launch pad for later …

A team of archaeologists and philologists from the Universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg, Germany, has identified the location of the ancient royal city of Mardama thanks to 3,250-year-old cuneiform tablets. 3,250-year-old cuneiform tablets were found inside a clay vessel at the archaeological site of Bassetki in the Kurdistan region of …

The discovery of Llanocetus denticrenatus — an ancient whale species that swam in Antarctic waters 34 million years ago, during a period called the Eocene — has paved the way for new knowledge about the evolution of baleen whales (Mysticeti). A life-like reconstruction of Llanocetus denticrenatus. Image credit: Carl Buell. …

An international team of researchers has discovered more than 30,000 artifacts at Panga ya Saidi, a cave in the humid coastal forest of Kenya, which is shedding new light on the crucial time period when Homo sapiens first started showing signs of modern behavior. The discovery is reported in the …

One of the enduring puzzles in astrobiology is why we haven’t found any aliens yet — and it’s worth another look, in light of Breakthrough Listen’s latest (and unprecedented) effort to find some in a new survey of millions of stars in our galaxy. Astronomers estimate there are between 200 …