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A robotic lunar lander built by private aerospace company Intuitive Machines was successfully launched by SpaceX on Thursday, with hopes of being the first American spacecraft to successfully touch down on the Moon’s surface since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. The Nova-C lander named “Odysseus” was carried into orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 …
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain With over half the world’s population heading to the polls in 2024, disinformation season is upon us—and the warnings are dire. The World Economic Forum declared misinformation a top societal threat over the next two years and major news organizations caution that disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracies worldwide. …
Jets of plasma may slow down the spins of black holes NASA/JPL-Caltech Most black holes may spin far more slowly than expected. When black holes form from collapsing stars, they emit powerful jets of energy, and these jets slow down the black holes’ spin to nearly nothing within minutes. The spin of a newborn …
Starch is a component of flour, a thickening agent in cooking Viktor Fischer/Alamy Building tiny sheets and cages from starch particles turns them into super-thickeners that could reduce the calorie content of foods. Starch is often added to foods like soups to make them richer and thicker, but doing so increases the calorie count …
By Ben Goldfarb Photographs by Tailyr Irvine Drive high enough into western Montana’s Lolo National Forest, up a succession of dirt tracks that parallel glittering creeks and twist through stands of fir and spruce, and eventually you’ll come to a clearing. At first glance it’s unremarkable, a grassy, sunlit hillside scattered with bleached tree …
Enlarge / The cut flowers could pay for themselves and even turn a profit. Flowers grown on inexpensive floating platforms can help clean polluted waterways, over 12 weeks extracting 52 percent more phosphorus and 36 percent more nitrogen than the natural nitrogen cycle removes from untreated water, according to our new research. In addition …
Explore One spring morning in 2003, Susan Sam looked out the kitchen window of her home in rural Imlay City, Michigan, and saw a small brown animal on the lawn. Not recognizing the creature, she called over her husband, Joe. He identified it as a groundhog. Having heard stories about their destructiveness, Joe suggested …
This article was originally featured on High Country News. Increasing frequent and intense fires are shaping how species change, according to a paper published last year in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. While previous research tended to focus on a blaze’s immediate impacts—Did population numbers go up or down?—scientists are starting to consider a longer timeline, …
Baroque German composer Johann Sebastian Bach produced music that is so scrupulously structured that it’s often compared to math. Although few among us are emotionally affected by mathematics, Bach’s works—and music in general—moves us. It’s more than sound; it’s a message. And now, thanks to tools from information theory, researchers are starting to understand …
Two large graves discovered in northern Bulgaria likely tell “a sad family story” about wealthy Roman landowners whose child predeceased them in the third century A.D., archaeologists say. In December 2023, a farmer unexpectedly found the graves while plowing his field in the village of Nova Varbovka. Because this region was a Roman province …