Science

US space agency NASA and SpaceX on Tuesday pushed back by 24 hours the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket that is to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.

NASA's Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russia's Andrey Fedyaev and Sultan al-Neyadi of the United Arab Emirates had been scheduled to blast off for the ISS at 2:07 am (0707 GMT) Sunday.

A Chinese biophysicist who was jailed for creating the world's first gene-edited babies said on Tuesday he was seeking collaborators after Hong Kong granted him a research visa, to the consternation of the scientific community.

He Jiankui was handed a prison term in 2019 for illegally experimenting on human embryos in a controversial exercise that saw twin girls born with genes he had altered to confer immunity to HIV.

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Can we objectively tell how fast we are aging? With a good measure, scientists might be able to change our rate of aging to live longer and healthier lives. Researchers know that some people age faster than others and have been trying to concisely measure the internal physiological changes that lead to deteriorating health with age.

For years, researchers have been using clinical factors normally collected at physicals, like hypertension, cholesterol and weight, as indicators to predict aging. The idea was that these measures could determine whether someone is a fast or slow ager at any point in their life cycle. But more recently, researchers have theorized that there are other biological markers that reflect aging at the molecular and cellular level. This includes modifications to a person’s genetic material itself, or epigenetics.

Highly intelligent "super pigs" are threatening disease and devastation in parts of the northern United States after wrecking portions of Canada.

The animals are the result of cross-breeding between domestic pigs and wild boars, which are responsible for a wide range of environmental damage, including eating crops, destroying trees and polluting water, and pigs have the potential to create a novel influenza virus that could spread to humans, reported The Guardian.

Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday the three astronauts who were left stranded by a pressure leak in their return capsule last year will be able to return on the Soyuz MS-23 replacement capsule in September.

Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio flew to the ISS in September 2022 aboard a Soyuz MS-22 capsule.

A man known as "the Duesseldorf patient" has become the third person declared cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant that also treated his leukemia, a study said on Monday.

Two other cases with both HIV and cancer, patients in Berlin and London, have previously been reported as cured in scientific journals following the high-risk procedure.

Artists have traditionally made these images by altering old photos of the suspect – adding wrinkles, hair loss and other common aspects of aging. But in recent years there has been a move towards using computer systems that employ machine learning, a much more sophisticated and formalized way of changing people’s faces.

We can’t predict with certainty how a person will look years after their last available photo, but these images can still help police. Here’s how the technology has developed.

Global warming melts sea ice, which leads to further warming because water absorbs more heat than ice, creating what scientists call a "climate feedback loop."

A report released Friday contains what researchers believe is the most comprehensive list of feedback loops ever compiled and a stark warning that climate models may be underestimating their impact.

As eastern Australian humpback whale populations have recovered over the years, males have adapted their mating strategy in a highly strategic way, new research finds.

I analysed 123 days’ worth of data on Australian humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae), collected from 1997 to 2015, and found male humpbacks sang less and fought more as the whale population ballooned.

Since the discovery of penicillin in the late 1920s, antibiotics have “revolutionized medicine and saved millions of lives.” Unfortunately, the effectiveness of antibiotics is now threatened by the increase of antibiotic-resistant bacteria globally.

Antibiotic-resistant infections cause the deaths of up to 1.2 million people annually, making them one of the leading causes of death.