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'Superflares' Likely Made Proxima b Uninhabitable Long Ago
The nearby alien planet Proxima b is not a great candidate to host life as we know it, a new study suggests.
Immensely powerful flares from Proxima b's parent star likely stripped some of life's key building blocks from the Earth-size alien world's atmosphere long ago, according to the study, which investigated the life-hosting potential of planets circling the small, dim stars known as red dwarfs.
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NASA wants to put a lander on Europa’s surface to look for life
The search for life on Europa is inching closer to reality. NASA has released a report outlining an initial set of objectives for a proposed mission to the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon.
The primary objective of this mission, the report says, is to search directly for evidence of life. Europa has been a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life since the mid-1990s when the Galileo orbiter indicated that a huge saltwater ocean may exist beneath its icy crust.
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NASA suggests nothing could survive on our nearest Earth-like planet
NASA has come up with a new model for figuring out whether a distant planet could be considered habitable. And when we apply it to the recently discovered rocky world orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri b, we might have to rule it out as a suitable home for alien life.
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Newly discovered 'radiation clouds' could pose extra risks to frequent flyers
Researchers have found evidence of mysterious 'radiation clouds' in Earth's stratosphere, which could expose passengers and crew on commercial flights to significantly higher levels of radiation than we realised.
For years now, researchers have known that increased exposure to cosmic rays at high altitudes is an unfortunate side effect of airflight, but the discovery of localised radiation clouds means travellers could be receiving twice as much radiation – or more – when passing through these isolated pockets of air.
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Scientists have found a crazy new way to print on paper using light
A new method for printing on paper using light promises to be much cheaper, and easier on the environment than the traditional ink-based printing we're used to.
Scientists have developed a special nanoparticle coating that's easy to apply to normal paper and changes colour when ultraviolet (UV) light shines on it. The colour change can be reversed when the coating is heated to 120 degrees Celsius (248 degrees Fahrenheit), and allows for up to 80 rewrites.
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Radiation levels in the Fukushima reactor are soaring unexpectedly
The radiation levels inside Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor No. 2 have soared in recent weeks, reaching a maximum of 530 sieverts per hour, a number experts have called "unimaginable".
Radiation is now by far the highest it has been since the reactor was struck by a tsunami in March 2011 - and scientists are struggling to explain what's going on.
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A quantum phase transition has been observed for the first time
For the first time, physicists have experimentally observed a first-order phase transition occur in a quantum system - verifying years of theoretical predictions.
Phase transitions are something that we see on a daily basis, when our ice melts into water, or steam evaporates from a boiling kettle. While these transitions are easy for us to observe, phase transitions also happen on the very tiny, quantum scale, where they play an important role in physics. But, up until now, no one had ever witnessed one experimentally.
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Why Earth Is A Prison and How To Escape It
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This new mind-reading technology lets locked-in patients communicate
The technology to control a computer using only your thoughts has existed for decades. Yet we’ve made limited progress in using it for its original purpose: helping people with severe disabilities to communicate. Until now, that is.
A new study has shown that an alternative brain-computer interface technology can help people with 'locked-in syndrome' speak to the outside world. It has even allowed sufferers to report that they are happy, despite the condition.
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Use stars’ own light to park tiny spacecraft at an exoplanet
It’s all very well dreaming up technologies that will let us travel quickly to other star systems, but how do we apply the brakes on arrival?
Rene Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and independent space researcher Michael Hippke now have an answer: we can slow down a solar sail-powered craft using the stars themselves.
The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over four light years away. Chemical propulsion technologies are too heavy to be practical – they would take 100,000 years to get there.
However, lasers fired from Earth can accelerate ultra-light solar sails made from graphene to around 20 per cent of the speed of light within a few minutes. That means an interstellar probe could reach the Alpha Centauri system – including the Earth-mass planet orbiting its companion star, Proxima Centauri – just 20 years after launch.
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Long-lost continent found submerged deep under Indian Ocean
An ancient continent that was once sandwiched between India and Madagascar now lies scattered on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
The first clues to the continent’s existence came when some parts of the Indian Ocean were found to have stronger gravitational fields than others, indicating thicker crusts. One theory was that chunks of land had sunk and become attached to the ocean crust below.
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An unexplained 'void' appears to be pushing the Milky Way through the Universe at 2 million km/h
You can’t feel it, but our planet is orbiting the Sun at speeds of roughly 100,000 km/h (62,000 mph), and something is making our Milky Way galaxy move through the Universe at more than 2 million km/h (1.2 million mph). That’s 630 km per second, and now scientists might have finally figured out why.
In front of us, there's a dense supercluster of galaxies some 650 million light-years away called the Shapley Concentration, and it's pulling us towards it. Behind us, scientists have found evidence of a previously unknown region of space that's almost entirely devoid of galaxies, and it's pushing us away with incredible force.
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One of our oldest ancestors has been discovered, and it had a big mouth and no butt
Palaeontologists have added another snapshot to our ancestral family album with the discovery of one of the oldest fossils that can be linked to human ancestry.
The researchers analysed 45 fossils roughly the size and shape of a grain of rice found in sedimentary rock from China’s Shaanxi province, and determined that they belonged to an as-yet-undescribed species of animal that's distantly related to humans.
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Possible sign of dark matter shows up again
A strange X-ray signal has popped up again in new measurements, raising hopes that it could be a sign of dark matter.
Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal an excess of X-rays at a particular energy, creating a bump on a plot, scientists report online at arXiv.org on January 29. The X-ray “line,” as it is known, could reveal the presence of dark matter — an unknown substance that scientists believe constitutes most of the matter in the cosmos.
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Hyperloop stream now Live!
Watch here
Over the last week, 27 teams have been on site at SpaceX in preparation for this weekend’s Hyperloop Pod Competition just outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. The purpose of the competition is to help accelerate the development of a functional Hyperloop prototype and encourage student innovation by challenging university students to design and build the best Hyperloop pod. This competition is the first of its kind anywhere in the world—
teams have put their pods through a litany of tests over the last week in hopes of making it into the Hyperloop test track itself.
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El Niño has an uncle that could send global warming into overdrive
You've probably heard about El Niño, the climate system that brings dry and often hotter weather to Australia over summer.
You might also know that climate change is likely to intensify drought conditions, which is one of the reasons climate scientists keep talking about the desperate need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the damaging consequences if we don't.
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Dragonfly wings can rip apart bacteria without antibiotics
Special bacteria-killing surfaces constitute a highly active area of research and development. Strategies to construct them vary widely.
One group of researchers has infused a slippery surface with molecules that disrupt bacterial communication. Others have shown that silver nanoparticle coatings can destroy bacteria. Yet another group used black silicon to create a surface that resembled a tiny 'bed of nails' (nanopillars), which physically rip bacteria apart.
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The trillion dollar reason to go back to the moon
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Astronomers spot a strange, supersonic space cloud screeching through our galaxy
While focussing on the remains of an exploded star roughly 10,000 light-years away, a team of Japanese astronomers have stumbled across a mysterious cloud of molecules tearing through the Milky Way. So quickly, in fact, they’ve nick-named it the unknown phenomenon the 'Bullet'.
The cause of this cloud’s ridiculous speed isn’t clear, but so far all signs suggest it's been sent hurtling through space thanks to a rogue black hole.
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Experts have come up with 23 guidelines to avoid an AI apocalypse
It's the stuff of many a sci-fi book or movie - could robots one day become smart enough to overthrow us? Well, a group of the world's most eminent artificial intelligence experts have worked together to try and make sure that doesn't happen.
They've put together a set of 23 principles to guide future research into AI, which have since been endorsed by hundreds more professionals, including Stephen Hawking and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
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Scientists have a plan to replace fossil fuels with nuclear fusion by 2030
Nuclear fusion is premised on building technology that would replicate the reaction that naturally powers our Sun - two light atoms, in this case, hydrogen, are fused together under extreme temperatures to produce another element, helium.
The process would release vast amounts of clean energy drawn from an almost limitless fuel source, with nearly zero carbon emissions.
However, it has yet to be done on a scale that would make it usable. Canadian scientists are hoping to change that, announcing plans to harness and develop nuclear fusion technology so they can deliver a working nuclear fusion plant prototype by 2030.
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We need to talk about school start times
Delaying school start times could help teenagers sleep better giving them a better chance for success. Researchers have found that students from schools that started earlier slept less, were less likely to meet the national sleep recommendations for their age were more often tired in the morning.
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Could Wormholes Really Work? Probably Not
Ah, wormholes. The intergalactic shortcut. A tunnel through space-time that allows intrepid travelers to hop from star system to star system without ever coming close to the speed of light.
Wormholes are a workhorse of sci-fi interstellar civilizations in books and on the screen because they solve the annoying problem of "Well, if we stuck to known physics, 99.99999 percent of the story would be as fascinating as watching people sleep."
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AI just won a poker tournament against professional players
An AI just claimed another gaming victory over humans by winning a 20-day poker tournament. The AI, called Libratus, took on four of the world’s best Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em poker players at a Pennsylvania casino. After 120,000 hands, Libratus won with a lead of over $1.7 million in chips.
“I’m feeling great,” says Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who was part of the team that created the AI. “This is a David versus Goliath story, and Libratus was able to throw a pebble.”
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This could be the first observational evidence that our early Universe was once a hologram
For decades, scientists have been toying with the idea that our Universe is - or once was - a giant hologram, where the laws of physics require just two dimensions, but everything appears three-dimensional to us.
As you can imagine, it's not an easy hypothesis to prove, but physicists say they now have observational evidence from the early Universe that fits just as neatly into the so-called hologram principle as it does with the standard Big Bang model.
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These Powerful Blazars Are the Most Distant Ever Seen
Monster black holes shooting jets of gamma-ray radiation right at us have been spotted farther away than ever before, dating back to when the universe was nearly one-tenth its current age.
The five distant objects, called gamma-ray blazars, deepen the mystery of how black holes so large could have formed so early in the universe's history.
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Earth’s magnetic poles are set to swap places - and we're totally unprepared
Earth’s magnetic field surrounds our planet like an invisible force field - protecting life from harmful solar radiation by deflecting charged particles away. Far from being constant, this field is continuously changing.
Indeed, our planet’s history includes at least several hundred global magnetic reversals, where north and south magnetic poles swap places. So when’s the next one happening and how will it affect life on Earth?
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