Science

A European spacecraft around Mars sent its first livestream from the red planet to Earth on Friday to mark the 20th anniversary of its launch, but rain in Spain interfered at times.

The European Space Agency broadcast the livestream with views courtesy of its Mars Express, launched by a Russian rocket from Kazakhstan in 2003.

In the forest, what a visitor should hear is the constant drip of moisture falling from the trees. Instead, it is the sound of dead branches snapping underfoot that breaks the silence on the dry trails.

The high-altitude forest is still clinging to life, and it delights walkers with an infinite variety of greens under an uncomfortably bright sun: the fog which reigned supreme here only a short time ago dissipates as the temperature rises, explained 24-year-old forest guide Andrey Castrillo.

Even when the disease is caught early, breast cancer recurrence is relatively commonplace -- and for survivors, the prospect can be daunting.

A drug developed by Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis reduced this risk by a quarter in a large group of early-stage survivors of the most common type of breast cancer, according to clinical trial results presented Friday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's (ASCO) annual meeting, offering patients new hope.

If Earth were to get an annual health checkup akin to a person's physical exam, a doctor would say the planet is "really quite sick right now."

That's how Joyeeta Gupta, professor of environment and development at the University of Amsterdam, put it at a Wednesday press conference accompanying the publication of new research in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. Co-authored by Gupta and 50 other scientists from around the world, it warns that nearly every threshold for a "safe and just" planet has already been breached and pleads for swift action to protect "the global commons for all people now and into the future."

From White Lotus to Succession, there’s high demand for television dramas about the super rich. The characters on these shows are typically portrayed as entitled, hollow and sad. But they aren’t necessarily depicted as unintelligent. So are rich people rich because they are smart?

In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, this question goes beyond scientific curiosity and touches something deeper.

The human brain is made up of around 86 billion neurons, linked by trillions of connections. For decades, scientists have believed that we need to map this intricate connectivity in detail to understand how the structured patterns of activity defining our thoughts, feelings and behavior emerge.

Our new study, published in Nature, challenges this view. We have discovered that patterns of activity in our neurons are more influenced by the shape of the brain – its grooves, contours, and folds – than by its complex interconnections.

Baby boys babble more than girls, according to a scientific paper out Wednesday that upends a common belief that females hold a language advantage over males early on in life.

The findings, published in iScience after the largest ever study on the subject, came as a surprise even to the paper's authors.

One of the most common stereotypes about the human past is that men did the hunting while women did the gathering. That gendered division of labor, the story goes, would have provided the meat and plant foods people needed to survive.

That characterization of our time as a species exclusively reliant on wild foods – before people started domesticating plants and animals more than 10,000 years ago – matches the pattern anthropologists observed among hunter-gatherers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Virtually all of the large-game hunting they documented was performed by men.

New research on old bones has shed light on pterosaur fossils from the early Cretaceous period of Australia, which took place roughly 107 million years ago.

The bones were discovered in Victoria in the late 1980s at a fossil site called Dinosaur Cove, a few hours’ drive west of Melbourne.

Some companies are now using tools that combine facial recognition software with artificial intelligence to constantly monitor and assess how much their workers are concentrating while on the job, The Guardian reports.

A woman in her 20s called Mae who spoke with the Guardian recounted how incredibly stressful it is to have your facial expressions monitored and cataloged in ways that will be used to evaluate your performance.