Serendipitously and for the first time, an international research team led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory formed solid binary gold hydride, a compound made exclusively of gold and hydrogen atoms. The researchers were studying how long it takes hydrocarbons, compounds made of carbon and hydrogen, to form diamonds…
The small satellite was to map lunar water, but operators lost contact with the spacecraft the day after launch and were unable to recover the mission. NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer ended its mission to the Moon on July 31. Despite extensive efforts, mission operators were unable to establish two-way communications after losing contact with the spacecraft…
A scene from a star-forming factory shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week. This Hubble picture captures incredible details in the dusty clouds in a star-forming region called the Tarantula Nebula. What’s possibly the most amazing aspect of this detailed image is that this nebula isn’t even in our galaxy. Instead,…
Eating three servings of French fries a week is associated with a 20% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but eating similar amounts of potatoes cooked in other ways — boiled, baked or mashed — does not substantially increase the risk, finds a study published by The BMJ on August 6. What’s more, replacing…
NASA Who will be the next human to leave their footprint on the surface of the Moon? They were the pioneers of space exploration – the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s. The death of Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, who guided the stricken…
Watch: Moment Jim Lovell told earth “Houston, we’ve had a problem” as Apollo 13 suffered a fault Astronaut Jim Lovell, who guided the Apollo 13 mission safely back to Earth in 1970, has died aged 97. Nasa said he had “turned a potential tragedy into a success” after an attempt to land on the Moon…
Mark Poynting and Justin Rowlatt BBC News Climate and Science Heather Hamilton / @cornwallunderwater Numbers of salps, seen here in 2024, have boomed in recent years The UK’s seas have had their warmest start to the year since records began, helping to drive some dramatic changes in marine life and for its fishing communities. The…
Georgina Rannard Climate and science correspondent David Bell Dennis Bell was on a two-year assignment in Antarctica The bones of a British man who died in a terrible accident in Antarctica in 1959 have been discovered in a melting glacier. The remains were found in January by a Polish Antarctic expedition, alongside a wristwatch, a…
What are the limits of quantum physics? This is a question that has been researched around the world for decades. If we want to make the properties of the quantum world technically usable, we need to understand whether objects that are significantly larger than atoms and molecules can also exhibit quantum phenomena. For example, small…
Most of us find it difficult to grasp the quantum world: According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it’s like observing a dance without being able to see simultaneously exactly where someone is dancing and how fast they’re moving – you always must choose to focus on one. And yet, this quantum dance is far from chaotic;…
