Science

Science • Jul 31

World-first photonic time crystal opens a new era of light control

Scientists have built the first all-optical photonic time crystal, allowing them to reshape the behavior of terahertz light at extraordinary speeds.

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Science • Jul 31

China team unearths world’s oldest amber, hidden in ancient Xinjiang coal seam

Chinese scientists have uncovered the world's oldest verified amber in the northwestern Xinjiang region, revealing that ancient plants were producing...

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Science • Jul 31

Study shows prehistoric people targeted female mammoths

July 31 (Reuters) - Woolly mammoths were a favorite hunting target for Ice Age people in Eurasia and North America for many reasons. A single animal would...

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Science • Jul 31

Huygens took around 700 pictures on its way down through Titan in 2005, and we have half of them, because a single command was missing from Cassini's instructions — one of the two radio channels was never switched on, and roughly 350 images were los

Most ways a space mission can fail are dramatic. A rocket explodes. A lander tips over. A heat shield fails and the whole thing burns up on the way down.

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Science • Jul 31

Keep Outer Space Tidy

As the UK wraps up its year as the chair of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Co-ordination Committee, KATE ARKLESS GRAY asks how close are we to making space...

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Science • Jul 31

It Took a Century, but Astronomers Imaged Betelgeuse's Companion

Most of us are familiar with Betelgeuse (also known as alpha Orionis), the bright shoulder star in the constellation Orion. It's a red supergiant star that...

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Science • Jul 31

Meteor Activity Outlook for August 1-7, 2026

Meteor activity kicks into high gear in August as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. The main reason for all this activity is the Perseid shower that peaks...

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Science • Jul 31

Titan turns so slowly that one rotation takes almost sixteen Earth days, and it is locked in place, showing Saturn the same face forever — so from one side of the moon the ringed planet hangs permanently in the sky, and from the other it is never seen at all

The ringed planet hangs eternally over one hemisphere of Saturn's moon while remaining forever invisible from the other—a cosmic geography born from the...

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Science • Jul 31

Ask Ethan: What would "first life" see in their night sky?

Human beings only see the Universe now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. What would the earliest life, anywhere, have seen instead?

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Science • Jul 31

Where in the West Country to see the biggest solar eclipse since 1999

People across the West Country will get their best view of a solar eclipse in nearly three decades when up to 95% of the sun disappears behind the moon on...

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Science • Jul 31

Tiny reef fish flourished beside islands filled with seabirds; where rats removed the birds, the entire u

Science News: Ecosystems work with each other no matter how far or disconnected they are. Animals and birds have impacts on each other's lives and deaths.

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Science • Jul 31

Mars rover discovers honeycomb-like fields on Red Planet

NASA officials say they're gobsmacked by new images from the Curiosity Mars rover that show stretches of Red Planet terrain covered in honeycomb-like...

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Science • Jul 31

A Martian day runs 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than an Earth day, so rover teams at JPL live on Mars time for the length of a mission, sliding their whole schedule later each day until they are eating breakfast at midnight, and their families describe it as j

The price of exploring Mars is paid by the people who never leave Earth, their circadian rhythms held hostage to a planet 140 million miles away.

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Science • Jul 31

A Ton of Space Junk Tumbles Unpredictably to Earth Every Week

Flaming chunks of metal crash into homes, farms and parking lots. Who's to blame? And who pays for the damage?

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Science • Jul 31

A Ton of Space Junk Tumbles Unpredictably to Earth Every Week

Flaming chunks of metal crash into homes, farms and parking lots. Who's to blame? And who pays for the damage?

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Science • Jul 31

The International Space Station circles the planet every 92 minutes, so its crew passes through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single working day, and the only way human bodies cope is for the station to ignore all of it and run on Greenwich time with the win

Astronauts orbiting Earth experience 16 sunrises and sunsets daily, but their bodies still need darkness—so the space station pulls down its blinds and...

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Science • Jul 31

Titan's air is four times thicker than ours and its gravity a seventh as strong, which means a human being there could in principle fly under their own muscle power — strap on wings, run a few paces, and flap

A human could actually fly on Saturn's largest moon—if the physics of thin gravity and thick atmosphere align just right.

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Science • Jul 31

Waste CO₂ converts into graphite through a newly observed two-step process

Graphite, the carbon core of a humble No. 2 pencil, is also an essential component in technologies such as batteries, smartphones, laptops and industrial...

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Science • Jul 30

The Hiroshima Bomb Created a Strange Alloy Never Seen on Earth From Vaporized Buildings and Metal

A microscopic grain preserved an atomic structure created inside Hiroshima's fireball.

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Science • Jul 30

Blue Origin Blew Up Its Launch Pad, So NASA Will Invite Its Rockets Over For Testing

If America is to continue its role as a leader outside our home, it will need to find whole-of-society methods to navigate setbacks. This is a good start.

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