About 15,000 years ago, in the oldest known cemetery in the world, people buried their dead in sitting positions with beads and animal horns, deep in a cave in what is now Morocco. These people were also found with small, sophisticated stone arrowheads and points, and 20th century archaeologists assumed they were part of an […]

Abstract Electrochemical devices for efficient production of hydrogen as energy carrier rely still largely on rare platinum group metal catalysts. Chemically and structurally modified metal dichalcogenide MoS2 is a promising substitute for these critical raw materials at the cathode side where the hydrogen evolution reaction takes place. For precise understanding of structure and hydrogen adsorption characteristics […]

WASHINGTON — A NASA investigation into a 2015 SpaceX launch failure concluded a design flaw, rather than a manufacturing defect, likely initiated the chain of events that destroyed the vehicle. NASA released March 12 a public summary of the report by an independent review team convened by NASA after the June 2015 accident during the launch of […]

SpotMini, Boston Dynamics’s dog-like quadruped robot, is back, and it’s learned a new trick. The robot, which was unveiled in June 2016 and then updated in November 2017, can now open doors and hold them open. While opening a door is slightly old hat for a Boston Dynamics robot – Atlas barrelled through a push-bar door two years ago – SpotMini’s operation […]

Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons. Try a quick experiment: Take two flashlights into a dark room and shine them so that their light beams cross. Notice anything peculiar? The rather anticlimactic answer is, probably not. That’s because the individual photons that make up light do not interact. Instead, they simply […]

A former high-ranking Iranian military leader recently claimed that Israel used lizard spies that “attract atomic waves” in order to identify the location of Iranian uranium mines. The remarks, by Hassan Firuzabadi, a military advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were made in response to the recent arrest of local environmentalists, The Times of Israel […]

new explanation for the moon’s origin has it forming inside the Earth when our planet was a seething, spinning cloud of vaporized rock, called a synestia. The new model led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Harvard University resolves several problems in lunar formation and is published Feb. 28 in the Journal of Geophysical […]

A mysterious cosmic signal radiating from the center of our Milky Way galaxy is actually triggered by ancient stars, rather than dark matter, according to a new study. There is a mysterious abundance of high-energy gamma-rays at the Milky Way’s core, also known as the galactic bulge. Previous studies suggested that this abundance originated from dark […]

New research reveals a possible mechanism allowing “black stars” and “gravastars” to exist When giant stars die, they don’t just fade away. Instead they collapse in on themselves, leaving behind a compressed stellar remnant, usually a city-size, superdense ball of neutrons appropriately called a neutron star. In extreme cases, however, most theorists believe an expiring […]

On October 19, the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii spotted something strange zooming through our solar system. It turned out to be a visitor from beyond our solar system, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. It is the first observed object from outside our solar system, according to a study published Monday in the journal […]