Science

NASA is having trouble tracking down two of its spacecraft. One of the TRACERS spacecraft has lost contact with Earth while the Athena EPIC satellite failed to send an important beacon signal. Both were launched on July 23 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Communicating with both has, thus far, proven a challenge …

A remarkable discovery of ancient fossils in North Greenland has recently shed light on a 500-million-year-old mystery that has baffled scientists for decades. Once believed to be early relatives of squids, these ancient creatures were thought to be among the first cephalopods to appear in the oceans. However, new research led by scientists from the University of Bristol and other …

Moitra, P. et al. Programmable wavefront control in the visible spectrum using low-loss chalcogenide phase-change metasurfaces. Adv. Mater. 35, 2205367 (2023). CAS  Google Scholar  Karvounis, A., Gholipour, B., MacDonald, K. F. & Zheludev, N. I. All-dielectric phase-change reconfigurable metasurface. Appl. Phys. Lett. 109, 051103 (2016). Wang, Y. et al. Electrical tuning of phase-change antennas and metasurfaces. Nat. Nanotechnol. 16, 667–672 …

SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS exist to do one thing: provide accurate, peer-reviewed reports of new research to an interested audience. But according to a paper published in PNAS on August 4th, that lofty goal is badly compromised. Scientific fraud, its authors conclude, happens on a massive scale and is growing quickly. In fact, though the number of scientific articles doubles every 15 …

Bee balm is one of the best perennials you can add to your flower beds if you want to enjoy seeing lots of butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds visiting your borders. A key part of annual maintenance is cutting back bee balm, but when is the best time to do this? There are benefits to consider from taking time to cut …

Update for Aug. 7: NASA and SpaceX have delayed the return of Crew-10 due to weather concerns. “NASA and SpaceX are standing down from the Thursday undocking opportunity of the Crew-10 mission from the International Space Station due to high winds forecasted for the splashdown locations off the coast of California,” the agency wrote in a statement. SpaceX and the …

After 50 Years, a Neutrino Detector Finally Catches Elusive Ghost Particles  SciTechDaily Direct observation of coherent elastic antineutrino–nucleus scattering  Nature Miniature Neutrino Detector Promises to Test the Laws of Physics  Scientific American New method for detecting neutrinos  EurekAlert! Scientists Succeed In Capturing Elusive “Ghost Particles” Escaping Nuclear Reactor  IFLScience Source link

As Greenland’s ice retreats, it’s fueling tiny ocean organisms. To test why, scientists turned to a computer model out of JPL and MIT that’s been called a laboratory in itself. Runoff from Greenland’s ice sheet is kicking nutrients up from the ocean depths and boosting phytoplankton growth, a new NASA-supported study has found. Reporting in Nature Communications: Earth & Environment, …

SpaceX Falcon 9 payload fairings, containing 24 of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites, rolls out of Amazon’s payload processing facility at Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility on Monday, Aug. 5, 2025. The satellites will launch on the KF-02 mission, the second Falcon 9 flight carrying these broadband satellites into low Earth orbit. Image: Amazon Amazon is back at the launch …

If you ever lie awake at night wondering just how likely you are to die from an asteroid impact within your lifetime, a new paper has you covered. A team led by physicist Carrie Nugent of the Olin College of Engineering in the US has calculated not just how likely it is that an asteroid will hit Earth during an …