Astronomers have clearly imaged a moon-forming disk encircling a planet outside of our solar system for the first time, and it looks like something from the Lord of the Rings. The disk is surrounding an exoplanet known as PDS 70c which orbits a star that is nearly 400 light-years away with its neighboring planet, PDS […]
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Artist’s impression of the internal structure of Mars. Image: IPGP / David Ducros ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. For the first time ever, scientists have studied the interior structure of a planet other than Earth by measuring seismic waves on Mars. Three new studies published in Science on […]
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Cannabis landraces in Qinghai province, central China. Image: Guangpen Ren ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Cannabis sativa, the plant that has gifted the world hemp, pot, and countless other earthly delights, is a modern cash crop with a rich history of cultivation that dates back thousands of […]
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Concept art of Europa lander. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. When it comes to the search for alien life within our own solar system, few worlds are more tantalizing than Jupiter’s moon Europa. This small moon contains a voluminous ocean of liquid water under its […]
Read MoreArtist’s depiction of a Dyson Sphere, a kind of hypothetical alien megastructure. Image: cokada via Getty Images In the last decade, we have devised amazing instruments to glare unflinchingly at the stars and discovered that other planets are common around them. These exoplanet discoveries have thrown gasoline on the fire of the astrobiology field, where scientists […]
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Image: NASA, ESA, and J. Nichols (University of Leicester) ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Earth’s auroras are among the most breathtaking spectacles on our planet, and yet they pale in comparison to the brilliant light shows that occur over the poles of Jupiter, which produce enough energy […]
Read MoreImage: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE via Getty Images Some five million people die every year from exposure to abnormally hot or cold temperatures related to climate change, a number that accounts for about 9.43 percent of global deaths, according to a first-of-its-kind study. Heat-related deaths are increasing across the world due to human-driven climate change, even as […]
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Brown trout. Image: Jay Fle ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Methamphetamine, a potent stimulant and a widely abused illicit substance, is a pervasive public health risk to communities that span the globe. Now, scientists have discovered that fish can also get addicted to meth that seeps into natural […]
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The engraved deer bone. Image: V. Minkus © NLD ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Every person alive today belongs to the species Homo sapiens, but tens of thousands of years ago, we were not the only human lineage to roam the planet. Across Europe and Asia, our […]
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Image: MARK GARLICK/ SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Palomar 5, a sprawled-out cluster of ancient stars that orbits the Milky Way, is flanked by two enormous tails of stars that extend across 30,000 light years, a feature that has long fascinated […]
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Concept art of merging black holes. Image: Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) / Courtesy of LIGO ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. One of Stephen Hawking’s most important predictions about black holes has finally been observationally confirmed by ripples in the fabric of spacetime, reports a new study. The […]
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Christina Koch performs Genes in Space experiment. Image: Sebastian Kraves ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. The advent of CRISPR/Cas9, a revolutionary method of genome-editing, has enabled countless new disease treatments, sparked profound ethical questions, and earned a Nobel Prize. Now, genome-editing using CRISPR has been successfully demonstrated in […]
Read MoreThe lake before June 2019 and after, as a doline. Image: Warner et al, Geophysical Research Letters, 2021 ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. A massive lake, filled with billions of cubic feet of water, vanished within the span of a few days in Antarctica, leaving a sinkhole that is […]
Read MoreThe Shark Bay mouse/Gould’s mouse. Image: Australian Wildlife Conservancy/ Wayne Lawler ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. A species of mouse that was presumed extinct for more than 150 years has been discovered alive on a remote offshore island, enabling scientists to “taxonomically resurrect” it, according to a new study. […]
Read MoreVenus. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Venus and Earth were born at the same time and are almost identical in size, and yet these two worlds have become vastly different environments over the past 4.5 billion years. Earth, bursting with life, is constantly reinventing its geography through […]
Read MoreImage: fotograzia via Getty Images ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Scientists have used a powerful radio telescope in the interior of British Columbia, Canada to gain incredible new insights about one of the universe’s most perplexing and brilliant phenomena: Fast radio bursts (FRBs), which are unexplained signals from space. Sometimes […]
Read MoreA Lusitanian toadfish at low tide. Image: Clara Amorim ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. The Lusitanian toadfish, a shallow-water fish that lives along the Atlantic and Mediterannean coasts, does not have the most conventionally romantic name or features (at least from a human perspective). But with the onset of […]
Read MoreConcept art of X-rays arriving at Earth. Image: DESY, Science Communication Lab ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. The universe is prone to erupting into all kinds of pyrotechnic displays, but gamma-ray bursts are in the top percentile of cosmic kabooms in terms of light and energy. These cataclysmic explosions […]
Read MoreJeff Bezos with “Blue Moon” lunar lander concept. Image: Jonathan Newton/ The Washington Post via Getty Images ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. The icy rivalry between space companies SpaceX and Blue Origin, which are owned respectively by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, has now spilled into the US […]
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ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. In the fight against human-caused climate change, a lot of attention is understandably given to the here-and-now. But a new study has looked to the fossil record to suggest that the planet will take millions of years to recover from the current damage being […]
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