Astronomy

Snake oil, smuggling and a fundamental change in the way we understand life

Babies born too soon seem to have stronger connections in one of the major brain areas that supports language processing if they regularly heard their mother read them a story while in intensive care

Babies born too soon seem to have stronger connections in one of the major brain areas that supports language processing if they regularly heard their mother read them a story while in intensive care

SpaceX closed out a dramatic chapter in the development of its super-heavy-lift Starship launch system with a successful flight test that mostly followed the script for the previous flight test.

With the successful 11th test flight of its Starship megarocket, SpaceX is on the cusp of a new era in spaceflight

Precise measurements of stars’ motions show that a wave is propagating outward from our galaxy’s center — perhaps from a long-ago collision with another galaxy.

The post A “Great Wave” Is Crashing through the Milky Way appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Earth's atmosphere has always been the enemy of ground based astronomy and don’t I know it. What would otherwise be crisp, clean datasets gets turned into blurry smudges. Space telescopes avoid the problem entirely but can only photograph tiny fragments of sky. Now, a team of mathematicians has cracked the code with an elegant algorithm that strips away atmospheric interference in seconds, potentially giving ground based observatories space quality vision whilst keeping their ability to survey great regions of sky.

When I spotted a headline about Earth's ancient oceans and urea, my brain immediately went to the obvious place. Urea, the same compound found in urine. Yes, scientists are telling us that a component of wee played a crucial role in one of the most important events in our planet's history. Sometimes science really does have a sense of humour.

A surge in global temperatures has caused widespread coral reef bleaching and death around the world

Nobel laureate Shimon Sakaguchi reflects on the role of regulatory T cells in peripheral immune tolerance and how the cells could transform treatment for cancer, autoimmune disease and organ transplant rejection

Avoiding, or at least limiting the damage from, geomagnetic storms is one of the most compelling arguments for why we should pay attention to space. Strong solar storms can have an impact on everything from air traffic to farming, and we ignore them at our own peril and cost. Despite that threat, the tools that we have applied to tracking and analyzing them have been relatively primitive. Both simulations and the physical hardware devoted to it require an upgrade if we are to accurately assess the threat a solar storm poses. As a first step, a new paper from a group led by researchers at the University of Michigan created a much more detailed simulation that shows how important it is that we also have the appropriate sensing hardware in place to detect these storms as they happen.

What you eat has a surprising impact on the pH of your body with wide ranging impacts on your health. But getting the balance right isn’t as simple as eating fewer acidic foods

What you eat has a surprising impact on the pH of your body with wide ranging impacts on your health. But getting the balance right isn’t as simple as eating fewer acidic foods

Nutrition scientists have unlocked an entirely new way of thinking about why certain foods are good for you and others are harmful. Here’s what to eat to function at your best

Nutrition scientists have unlocked an entirely new way of thinking about why certain foods are good for you and others are harmful. Here’s what to eat to function at your best

In a newly published novel titled “Hole in the Sky,” Cherokee science-fiction author Daniel H. Wilson blends Native American tales about alien civilizations with up-to-date speculation about UFOs, now also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs.

Are you terse and informal when speaking to an AI chatbot? If so, you might be getting worse answers than if you used more formal language

Are you terse and informal when speaking to an AI chatbot? If so, you might be getting worse answers than if you used more formal language

Stars often fall into black holes, and now it seems the opposite can also occur, producing an extra long-lasting explosion as the star is consumed from within