Tag Archives: drifting

By XANTHA LEATHAM, EXECUTIVE SCIENCE EDITOR Published: 14:01, 16 September 2025 | Updated: 18:39, 16 September 2025 It’s the reliable celestial companion that’s stuck around for 4.5 billion years. But the moon is slowly drifting away from Earth, a physicist has revealed. Dr Stephen DiKerby, a researcher in Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University, said the moon is getting …

In his 1963 scifi story “The Invincible,” the Polish writer Stanisław Lem imagined an artificial species of free-floating nanobots which roamed the atmosphere of a far-off planet. Like tiny bugs, the microscopic beings were powerless alone, but together they could form cooperative swarms to gather energy, reproduce, and ultimately defend their territory from predators with deadly force. Unlike the story’s …

“Imagine a life spent riding currents, never touching solid earth,” says Schmidt Ocean Institute on Instagram alongside a captivating video of a pelagic octopus drifting along. “You’d have to be different than others of your kind so you can easily hide in plain sight.”  The octopus was gliding along 1,047 metres deep when pilots of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) caught it on camera during the …