Science

Science • Jul 13

The most common type of planet discovered in the Milky Way may be a world that does not exist in our solar system — larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and wrapped in an atmosphere we barely understand

The Solar System gives us a familiar catalogue of planets: small rocky worlds close to the Sun, then gas and ice giants farther out. For a long time, that.

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Science • Jul 13

A T. rex found in South Dakota could smash auction records — and possibly disappear forever

A large T. rex skeleton nicknamed 'Gus' is on track to break auction records, and highlight one of paleontology's biggest predicaments.

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Science • Jul 13

“It seizes the victim with large spines, impaling and immobilising the prey…” This ultimate hunter might look like a spider, but don’t be fooled…

In this clip from BBC Earth's Expedition Guyana, George McGavin explores an extreme habitat underneath a hollowed-out tree in a Guyanan rainforest.

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Science • Jul 13

The surprising health benefits of having orange hair

The gene behind orange-red hair seen in a section of people may also provide some health advantages by protecting the cells that produce the pigment,...

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Science • Jul 13

Antarctica is classified as a desert because it receives less precipitation than the Sahara, yet it holds about 70 per cent of the planet's fresh water, locked in an ice sheet averaging over two kilometres thick across the continent

The South Pole gets less snow in a year than Phoenix gets rain. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where the United States has kept people alive...

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Science • Jul 13

‘Disappointed’: Cochrane journal asked researchers to publish article, then retracted it for conflicts

A developer of an AI tool for conducting literature reviews said he and his team were “excited and honored” when a Cochrane journal had extended a “specific...

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Science • Jul 13

The FCC just gave Reflect Orbital permission to launch its 1st space mirror to orbit. Tens of thousands more could follow

Reflect Orbital just got approval to launch its first light-directing space mirror, which it plans to do later this year. Tens of thousands more such craft...

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Science • Jul 13

Einstein’s relativity allows time travel into the future, and we have already measured it: atomic clocks flown around Earth on aeroplanes came home showing a different time from clocks left on the ground

The first machine to carry a human-made clock measurably into the future was a scheduled passenger flight. In October 1971, a physicist and an astronomer.

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Science • Jul 13

Late-night SpaceX rocket launch from Florida today. When to see liftoff

What time is SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch near NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida? Best places to watch liftoff of the Starlink satellite mission.

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Science • Jul 13

Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, but the energy inside a single photon can spend tens of thousands of years bouncing through the Sun's dense core before it ever escapes the surface to begin that eight-minute trip

Sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth from the solar surface. But the energy inside each photon spent tens of thousands of years pinballing...

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Science • Jul 13

Birds are not descended from dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs, a living branch of the theropod family that survived the asteroid and now fills the world with more than 10,000 species

The pigeon on the windowsill is a dinosaur. Not the descendant of one. One.

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Science • Jul 13

Every Frame of a Black Hole Movie Is a Time Machine – And Physicists Think We're Oversimplifying

We usually treat a photograph as a record of one moment in time.

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Science • Jul 13

Young crescent moon to meet Venus in evening twilight

Two celestial beauties line up on Friday when the young crescent moon meets brilliant Venus in the evening twilight. It will be one of the prettiest...

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Science • Jul 13

Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is sealed beneath a shell of ice, but the ocean hidden below may contain twice as much liquid water as every ocean on Earth combined — and Jupiter’s gravity may have kept it liquid for billions of years

Europa looks, at first, like a frozen world that should be finished. It orbits far from the Sun, locked in the cold outer Solar System, its surface crossed...

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Science • Jul 13

A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about four billion tonnes on Earth — roughly the mass of a mountain — because the star has crushed the equivalent of the Sun into a sphere the width of a city

PSR B1919+21, the first neutron star ever detected, was picked up by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in Cambridge in 1967 as a metronome-steady radio pulse arriving...

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Science • Jul 13

Perseid Meteor Shower Returns This Week Under An ‘Earthshine’ Moon

North America's celestial highlights for the week ahead, which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere. This week, the Perseids...

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Science • Jul 13

25 Year Old Building India's Spaceplane

'ISRO is planning to build a Bharatiya Antariksh Station by 2030. So, our goal is to create a vehicle that can supply modules to the Bharatiya Antariksh...

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Science • Jul 13

Around 252 million years ago, volcanoes across what is now Siberia erupted repeatedly for more than a million years, releasing perhaps 100,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and helping wipe out roughly 90 per cent of marine species in the deadliest mas

The end-Permian extinction was not a single volcano exploding on one bad day. It was a long volcanic province, a changing climate system, and a marine.

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Science • Jul 13

Light Usually Speeds Things Up. Scientists Just Caught It Doing The Opposite in The Nanoworld

The fundamentals of light continue to fascinate scientists and reveal new secrets – including how its effects can be counterintuitive.

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Science • Jul 13

Tiny waves in the deep ocean can affect the climate thousands of kilometres away

What happens in the deep ocean might seem far removed from your everyday life. A new study shows otherwise.

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