A new law in Brazil could cause “significant environmental harm and human rights violations”, and represents a “rollback for decades” of protections in Brazil, including for the Amazon, a UN expert has told BBC News. Plans to speed up approvals for development projects were criticised by Astrid Puentes Riaño, a UN special rapporteur, as the…
SPL Artwork: Uranus and its five largest moons had been thought to be inactive and sterile. The planet Uranus and its five biggest moons may not be the dead sterile worlds that scientists have long thought. Instead, they may have oceans, and the moons may even be capable of supporting life, scientists say. Much of…
BBC On Christmas Eve, an autonomous spacecraft flew past the Sun, closer than any human-made object before it. Swooping through the atmosphere, Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe was on a mission to discover more about the Sun, including how it affects space weather on Earth. This was a landmark moment for humanity – but one without…
Georgina Rannard Climate and science reporter Watch: Lift-off for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin as rocket New Glenn launches into orbit Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s space company has blasted its first rocket into orbit in a bid to challenge the dominance of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The New Glenn rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station…
Watch: SpaceX loses Starship spacecraft but catches booster on seventh test flight The latest test of Space X’s giant Starship rocket has failed, minutes after launch. Officials at Elon Musk’s company said the upper stage was lost after problems developed after lift-off from Texas on Thursday. But the Super Heavy booster managed to return to…
Alison Francis Senior Science Journalist NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona Asteroid Bennu is a 500m-wide pile of boulders, rocks and rubble The chemical building blocks of life have been found in the grainy dust of an asteroid called Bennu, an analysis reveals. Samples of the space rock, which were scooped up by a Nasa spacecraft and brought…
Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News WWF Krill are just a few centimetres long fully grown, but are one of the most abundant animals on Earth Scientists say subtle differences in the colour of seawater will enable them to count tiny – but critically important – Antarctic marine creatures, from Space. The target of the…
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is tough on electronics. Situated inside a 17-mile-long tunnel that runs in a circle under the border between Switzerland and France, this massive scientific instrument accelerates particles close to the speed of light before smashing them together. The collisions yield tiny maelstroms of particles and energy that hint at answers…
The coelacanth is known as a “living fossil” because its anatomy has changed little in the last 65 million years. Despite being one of the most studied fish in history, it continues to reveal new information that could transform our understanding of vertebrate evolution. This is revealed in a study published in the journal Science…
BBC As a Ryanair flight from London approached Vilnius, Lithuania, on 17 January, its descent was suddenly aborted. Just minutes from touching down, the aircraft’s essential Global Positioning System (GPS) suffered an unexplained interference, triggering an emergency diversion. The Boeing 737 MAX 8-200 had already descended to around 850ft (259m) when the disruption occurred. Instead…
