Science

  SpaceX initially wanted to conduct a high-altitude test of its Starship vehicle last year, but setbacks pushed the timeline into 2020. Now, SpaceX may be looking at another delay. The company’s Starship SN1 prototype just blew its top at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas facility. The rocket was undergoing …

A team of researchers from New Zealand and Germany has demonstrated that the honeybee brain generates oscillations which share characteristics of ‘alpha’ oscillations in the human brain. Popov Szyszka found a prominent spontaneous oscillation around 18 Hz in the honeybee brain that is reduced in amplitude upon olfactory stimulation. Image …

A team of biologists led by University of Western Australia researchers used Schmidt Ocean Institute’s deep-sea remotely operated vehicle, SuBastian, which is capable of sampling depths to 4,500 m, to explore the Bremer, Leeuwin and Perth submarine canyons. Coral garden found in Bremer Canyon, Western Australia as part of a …

In a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of physicists reports the most precise measurement ever made of the electric dipole moment of the neutron, a subatomic particle found in the nucleus of every atom except that of hydrogen. Their results show that the neutron has …

  Astronomers observing the universe have detected some massive bursts of energy over the years, but nothing compares with the blast recently spotted by scientists at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. The explosion some 390 million light-years away is the largest ever recorded. The epicenter of the eruption …

An enigmatic worm-like animal called Facivermis yunnanicus lost lower limbs for tube-dwelling lifestyle, according to new research published in the journal Current Biology. Facivermis yunnanicus. Image credit: Franz Anthony. Facivermis yunnanicus lived some 518 million years ago in the Cambrian period. It had a long body and five pairs of …

In 1947, American physicist Willis Lamb and his colleagues observed an incredibly small shift in the energy levels of the hydrogen atom as the atom’s electron and proton interacted with vacuum. Under traditional physics theories of the day, the Lamb shift shouldn’t have occurred. The ‘nothing’ of vacuum shouldn’t influence …

On January 3, 2019, China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-4 probe successfully landed on the eastern floor of Von Karman, a 180-km- (112 mile) wide crater located within an even larger impact crater known as the South Pole-Aitken basin, becoming the first spacecraft to land safely on the Moon’s farside. The …

The strong force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, which also include gravity, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. The strong force is responsible for binding together the protons and neutrons that form the nucleus of the atom, and thus the core of every atom that builds …

  NASA’s InSight lander has been on Mars for more than a year now, and it’s slowly revealing new facets of the red planet’s story. We used to think of Mars as a dead world, but missions like InSight have increasingly shown there’s a little life left in Mars. In …