Does napping more during the day lead to a better night’s sleep for babies? Westend61 GmbH/Alamy How Babies SleepHelen Ball (Cornerstone Press (UK); Balance (US)) Like many mothers of young children, I have spent a lot of nighttime hours reading about baby sleep on the internet. I’m fluent in the lexicon – from wake windows…
SpaceX’s Ninth Starship Test Flight Delivers Mixed Results The largest, most powerful launch vehicle ever built is meant to be a key part of SpaceX’s plans to send humans to Mars—and NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon, too By Gayoung Lee edited by Lee Billings The SpaceX Starship rocket launches from Starbase, Texas,…
Leprosy can be caused by two species of bacteria, Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis nobeastsofierce Science/Alamy A form of leprosy affected people in the Americas long before the arrival of Europeans, contrary to popular belief. “The narrative around leprosy has been always been that it’s this awful disease that Europeans brought to America,” says Nicolàs…
In the early 1980s, then real estate developer Donald Trump famously tried to evict a group of New York City residents from a rent-controlled building that he wanted to replace with a luxury high-rise. The tenants eventually beat back the plan. Today President Trump is having more luck with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies…
Illustration of ancient birds nesting above the Arctic circle Gabriel Ugueto Newly discovered bone fragments from Alaska suggest birds have been breeding and nesting in the Arctic for at least 73 million years. “Which is kind of crazy, because it’s not easy to live in the Arctic and have newborn babies up there,” says study…
An ancient, distant human cousin from southern Africa called Paranthropus robustus has for the first time revealed molecular clues to its evolutionary status. Protein sequences preserved in four partial P. robustus teeth from different individuals that lived roughly 2 million years ago indicate that larger and smaller fossils of this hominid species cannot always be…
These Climbers Summited Mount Everest in Record Time. Did Inhaling Xenon Help? British climbers recently reached the top of Mount Everest in record time. They inhaled xenon gas before the trip. But was that the decisive factor? By Stephanie Pappas edited by Jeanna Bryner Part of the Himalayan mountains, Mount Everest is considered the highest…
Could a new approach help make quantum computers error-free? Nord Quantique A Canadian quantum computing start-up claims its new qubit will enable much smaller and cheaper error-free quantum computers. But getting there will be a steep challenge. To correct its own errors, a traditional computer saves duplicates of information in multiple places, a practice called…
Four-year-old Elijah’s task was to draw a penguin, his favorite animal, and then rip up the paper so the scraps could be used for another project. The adults leading the project hoped that making Elijah uncomfortable would help the preschooler navigate similar tricky situations in his daily life. “He was not having it,” recalls Elijah’s…
Astronomers Discover Mysterious Object Bursting with X-Rays A celestial object some 15,000 light-years away is emitting bright flashes of radio and X-rays that scientists are struggling to explain By Robert Lea & SPACE.com An X-ray, infrared and radio view of the sky surrounding ASKAP J1832−0911 (circled) using combined light from multiple telescopes. X-ray: NASA/CXC/ICRAR, Curtin Univ.,…
