An asteroid heading toward Earth can be deflected without ever touching a spacecraft. The trick is to use X-rays to deflect the space rock, researchers report Sept. 23 Nature Physics. In laboratory experiments, scientists heated the surfaces of free-falling artificial asteroids with X-ray radiation, producing steam plumes that blew the objects away. Later computer simulations […]

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will soon be on its way to help solve a quarter-century-old mystery: Could anything live in the ocean hiding beneath the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa? “This is a mission we’ve dreamed about for 25 years now, since I was in graduate school,” says planetary geologist Cynthia Phillips of NASA’s […]

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The rapid intensification of both storms was fueled by unusually warm Gulf water. Developing tropical storms can absorb heat […]

Scythian shepherds and horse-riding warriors who inhabited central Asia and eastern Europe about 2,500 years ago may have had cultural roots several thousand kilometers east in Siberia, a new study suggests.SN: 27/7/23). The remains of at least one person and 18 horses found atop a roughly 2,800-year-old tomb in southern Siberia may come from a […]

Dozens of runaway stars were captured fleeing a dense star cluster in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The cluster of fast-moving stars may mean that such runaways had a greater influence on cosmic evolution than previously thought, astronomers report Oct. 9 in Nature. Massive stars are born in new clusters, packed so close […]

As artificial intelligence explodes in popularity, two of its pioneers have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for fundamental discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm announced on Oct. 8. These computational tools, […]

Astronomers have finally found an asteroid that keeps pace with Saturn in its orbit around the sun. Such objects, called Trojan asteroids, are already known for the other three giant planets. “Saturn was kind of the odd man out, if I can call it that, because even though it’s the second most massive planet in […]

Wind ownership is available. As an unpaid intern at an energy company in England, Emilia Groupp spent two years creating wind maps for renewable energy development. Colleagues told Groupp to ignore the wind blowing across British borders, saying things like, “Oh, we don’t want French wind,” recalled Groupp, an energy anthropologist at Stanford University. The […]