Illustration of the exoplanet K2-18b NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Apparent signs of alien life on the exoplanet K2-18b may just be statistical noise, according to a new analysis of data from the James Webb Space Telescope. On 17 April, Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues made the stunning…
The simple answer is–it’s because the Sun is the most massive object in the solar system. Sun’s gravitational pull is massive as the Sun weighs around 1.989×1030 kg, to put this into your perspective, the Sun contributes about 99.8% of the entire mass of the solar system! This is why it has the strongest gravitational…
Picture this: it’s April 2020, you’re between Zoom meetings, and scrolling through your social media newsfeed. Headlines like “Death toll continues to rise”, “COVID-19 may cause long-term health implications” and “Health-care systems overwhelmed” flash across your screen. Your mood takes a dive, but you can’t stop scrolling. If this scenario rings true for you, you’re…
The rapid pace of change under the current presidential administration has been amping up people’s feelings of uncertainty. That collective unease can take a toll on societal well-being, researchers say. “Given that unfamiliarity permeates our current ether … uncertainty can be considered a widespread public health problem,” Emily Hauenstein argued earlier this year in…
In The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, author Dava Sobel celebrates the many women who came to Paris to work with Marie Curie after she won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. Many of these women went on to become experts in radioactivity, creating…
Bone collector caterpillars from the Waianae mountain range in Oahu, Hawaii Daniel Rubinoff et al. 2025 The newly described “bone collector” caterpillar species disguises itself with the body parts of dead insects so that it can live among spiders and poach their prey. This is the only caterpillar known to use such grisly camouflage or…
Have you ever imagined a life without today’s telecommunication? Long ago when even electricity was unknown, forget about telephones and mobiles, this is a time when civilizations communicated through birds, letters, or human messengers. For instance, the Inca Empire, flourishing in South America from the 15th to the 16th century, utilized a sophisticated network of…
Sudden oak death, caused by the pathogen Phythophthora ramorum, is one of the most ecologically devastating forest diseases in North America, responsible for the deaths of millions of oaks and tanoaks along the coast. Science to the rescue? After the success of genetically modified organisms in things like insulin and food, a recent trend is Genetically Rescued…
As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone. Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast England, provide the first physical evidence of a Roman-era battle between a gladiator and a nonhuman animal anywhere in…
84 Percent of Corals Impacted in Mass Bleaching Event The world is experiencing the most intense global coral bleaching event on record, with 84 percent of reefs experiencing heat stress from warming oceans By Andrea Thompson edited by Dean Visser Fish swim around a bleached coral. d3_plus D.Naruse @ Japan/Getty Images All around the world,…
