November 28, 2025 1 min read NASA Recruits Mars Perseverance Rover to Monitor Sun’s Activity Mars is passing behind the sun, giving NASA’s Perseverance rover a view of the star’s far side By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner NASA has drafted its Mars rover Perseverance to help monitor the sun’s activity. Every day for…
We throw away hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic each year Cavan Images/Alamy Chemical additions to plastic that mimic natural polymers like DNA can create materials that break down in days, months or years rather than littering the environment for centuries. Researchers hope their new technique will lead to plastic products that serve their…
The only major difference between the sun and the stars we see at night is that the sun happens to be close to us—which is advantageous, assuming you enjoy being alive. Astronomers enjoy this as well but have another reason for rejoicing in the sun’s proximity: this allows us to see it as a disk….
The Congo rainforest is the second largest in the world guenterguni/Getty Images African forests are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb, a fundamental shift that will make it more difficult for the world to cut its net emissions to zero. Forests and shrubby woodlands on the continent have previously been one of the…
The ancient human foot bones have been a mystery since they were discovered by scientists in 2009 Yohannes Haile-Selassie The provenance of 3.4-million-year-old foot bones in Ethiopia may have finally been solved – and could prompt a rethink into how our various ancient human ancestors coexisted. In 2009, Yohannes Haile-Selassie at Arizona State University and…
Exotic stars could be powered by dark matter remotevfx/Getty Images We may have seen the first hints of strange stars powered by dark matter. These so-called dark stars could explain several of the most mysterious objects in the universe, while also giving us hints about the true nature of dark matter itself. Normal stars form…
Thierry Nordmann was on his first night shift as a dermatologist at University Hospital Basel, Switzerland, when he got the emergency call. A patient was being brought in who’d had a severe reaction to their medication, which had destroyed the entire outer layer of their skin. Nordmann’s job was to confirm the diagnosis with a…
The Indus Valley Civilisation ruins at Moenjodaro in Pakistan Sergey-73/Shutterstock Climate warming and severe droughts dealt a death blow to the Indus Valley Civilisation, a mysterious urban culture that flourished around 4000 years ago in what is now Pakistan and India. This culture developed settlements along the Indus river and its tributaries, expanding even further…
Wildfires in California in January were intensified by climate change JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images Starvation, economic collapse, civil unrest and wars are among the risks we face if we don’t take decisive action to limit further global warming and preserve nature, leading experts in climate, food, health and security warned today in London. The…
How many pieces will a dropped vase shatter into? Imaginechina Limited / Alamy A dropped plate, a smashed sugar cube and a broken drinking glass all seem to follow the same law of physics when it comes to how many fragments of a given size they will shatter into. For several decades, researchers have known…
