A persistent area of unusually warm tropical ocean helped intensify snowfall over East Antarctica, contributing to a net temporary increase in ice sheet mass of about 695 billion tons, according to a new study published in Nature on August 19. The researchers found that sustained warming in the tropical warm pool during 2021-23 triggered a … Read more
Saturn’s north pole captured by Cassini in 2013. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill) Although some would argue that the hexagon is the bestagon, astronomers have found that Saturn appears to favor the ten-sided decagon at its south pole. This comes as its south pole has recently been confirmed to show a pattern that is strangely ten-sided, … Read more
Enceladus is small enough to fit comfortably within the length of Great Britain. Its electromagnetic influence, however, reaches a distance greater than the usual maximum separation between the Earth and the Moon. A peer-reviewed analysis of Cassini data in 2026 has traced disturbances associated with Saturn’s icy moon to at least 504,000 kilometers downstream. This … Read more
Neptune has 16 known moons, but hardly any conventional lunar system. Triton alone contains more than 99 percent of the satellite system’s mass, traveling backwards around the planet and leaving only a compact collection of small inner moons, faint rings and distant, irregular companions. That peculiar architecture has long signaled an ancient catastrophe. Triton probably … Read more
Voyager 2 arrived at Uranus on January 24, 1986 and remains the only spacecraft to have visited the planet. Its brief passage discovered Uranus’s magnetic field and provided the in situ measurements behind almost all subsequent accounts of the planet’s magnetosphere. There was always the danger of turning a flyby into a permanent portrait. A … Read more
Last updated on September 6, 2026 Evan Smith used the newly released connectome of an adult male fruit fly (which mapped 166,000 neurons from HHMI Janelia and Google Research) to run a real-time spike network in Minecraft. The game’s sensory inputs activate clusters of neurons, driving actions like flying or grooming, while emphasizing that it’s … Read more
A woman took a shortcut through a cemetery to avoid a parking fee and ended up in a scientific paper. Rachel Fordyce worked as a technician in an entomology laboratory at Cornell University. To avoid paying for a parking spot on campus, I used to park in a nearby plaza and walk the last stretch … Read more
(NewsNation) — China has set a timeline for recovering samples from the surface of Mars within the next half-decade, while similar ambitions in the US have been sidelined by funding issues. The Tianwen-3 robotic mission launching in 2028 would travel to the Red Planet, collect 500 grams (1.1 pounds) of samples and return them to … Read more
An atomic force microscopy scan of a nanometer-sized device developed by Carnegie Mellon scientists demonstrating a new form of the Hall effect. For more than a century, the Hall effect has been taught with a simple picture of electricity flowing through a material, a magnetic field pushing moving charges sideways, and a voltage appearing across … Read more
Imagine an alien civilization powered by dazzling technologies far more advanced than ours. Imagine city-sized spaceships, planetary mines, or swarms of solar panels harvesting energy directly from a star. As these aliens go about their supernatural business, the erosive forces of space wear away at their infrastructure, releasing small pieces of debris that break off … Read more