Science & Engineering
AI did not just demand more electricity — it demanded water
The public argument about artificial intelligence has mostly been an argument about electricity.
Science & Engineering
In 1610, Galileo spotted a small, smooth moon circling Jupiter and wrote it down
In January 1610, Galileo Galilei turned a small telescope toward Jupiter and noticed something that should not have been there: tiny points of light close to the planet, changing position from night to night.
Science & Engineering
Solar storms puffed up Earth’s upper atmosphere enough to drag a $500 million NASA…
The Sun has been so active lately that it puffed up the top of Earth's atmosphere and began dragging a NASA space telescope down toward a fiery reentry.
Science & Engineering
The oldest known image of the cosmos is a Bronze Age disc of bronze and gold, dug…
Buried around 1600 BC, looted in 1999 and seized in a Basel sting in 2002, the Nebra sky disc carries what one research team calls the earliest concrete picture of the night sky. How firmly the bronze can prove that is still argued.
Science & Engineering
Over six days in July of 1994, 21 fragments of a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9…
The first time human beings ever watched two objects hit each other in space was in July 1994, and the observation happened almost by accident because a…
Science & Engineering
A freely swinging pendulum slowly turns the direction of its swing on its own
In 1851 Léon Foucault hung a heavy bob on a long wire under the dome of the Panthéon and set it swinging. Its path slowly rotated, the first plain, direct sign anyone could watch of the Earth turning on its axis. It does not, though, turn once a day everywhere.
Science & Engineering
A world just 25 light-years away sits in the narrow zone where liquid water could…
A planet just 25 light-years away, already known to sit in the narrow band where liquid water could exist, has been reassessed by astronomers led by the University of California, Irvine.
Political Economy
Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic, is controlled by a Copenhagen charity that…
The Novo Nordisk Foundation controls 77% of the voting power in the maker of Ozempic through A-shares that have never been traded and legally cannot be sold — making a Copenhagen charity the permanent, unsellable owner of one of Europe's most valuable companies.
Science & Engineering
Astronomers found a third galaxy with almost no dark matter, and all three sit on…
The stars inside a faint galaxy called DF9 drift so slowly that its whole mass matches its visible stars alone. It is the third dark-matter-poor galaxy found strung along one narrow trail in the same patch of sky.
Science & Engineering
Scientists have detected a giant fan-shaped structure buried beneath the East…
East Antarctica can look, from above, like the quiet half of the frozen continent: old, thick, cold and buried under kilometres of ice.
Science & Engineering
A rare meteorite found in the Sahara may be a surviving shard of a lost Moon-sized…
A rock about the size of a fist, found lying in the Sahara, may be a surviving shard of a lost world nearly as large as the Moon.
Science & Engineering
Fossil jaws hidden inside Cretaceous rocks have revealed that 100 million years…
Octopuses are among the worst animals to leave behind as fossils. Their bodies are mostly soft tissue.
Science & Engineering
In November, a spacecraft that has spent eight years falling toward the Sun will…
In November, a spacecraft called BepiColombo, after nearly eight years looping through the inner solar system, will finally let Mercury capture it into orbit.
Political Economy
At independence in 1966, Botswana had about 12 km of paved road and only a few…
Twelve kilometres of paved road. That is the figure that opens almost every account of Botswana at independence.
Space & Missions
NASA awards nearly $600 million for four new Moon Base cargo landings, targeting…
Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines will each fly updated versions of landers they have already flown, carrying the same three NASA science instruments to build a network of data across the lunar surface.
Science & Engineering
Deep in the Mexican jungle this June, archaeologists reached an intact Maya city…
The discovery being described is Ocomtún, the Maya city announced after fieldwork in May and June 2023 in the Balamkú Ecological Conservation Zone of Campeche, Mexico.