Science

Earth is going to have its very own mini-moon from September 29 until November 25. The regular Moon’s new, temporary friend is 2024 PT₅, an asteroid captured from the Arjuna asteroid group (called the “Arjunas”).

Our new mini-moon is approximately 10 meters in diameter and will be captured by Earth’s gravity for 57 days. It’s small and faint, so it won’t be visible by the eye or with small telescopes, but will be visible to larger telescopes.

A rare, nearly complete fossil of an extinct North American porcupine helped me and my colleagues solve a decades-long debate about how the modern North American porcupine evolved from its ancestors.

Published in Current Biology, our paper argues that North American porcupine ancestors may well date back 10 million years, but they wouldn’t be recognizable until about 8 million years later.

India's one-horned Asian rhino population has almost tripled in the past four decades thanks to conservation and anti-poaching efforts, according to government figures.

Data released on Sunday -- World Rhino Day -- said the number of the animals, known for their single horn and thick, armour-like skin, had surged from 1,500 four decades ago to more than 4,000 now.

Former President Donald Trump blamed COVID-19 on "dust" that "flew in from China."

In an interview that aired on Sunday, Heritage Foundation-funded journalist Sharyl Attkisson asked Trump about how well he handled the pandemic.

"Study finds levels of a dangerous gas “off the scales” in Central Texas oilfield" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Two new drugs, the first capable of slowing down the debilitating progression of Alzheimer's disease, have become embroiled in one of the biggest medical controversies in recent years.

For their defenders, the drugs lecanemab and donanemab represent the first real chance to fight the disease after decades of research -- for detractors, they are another disappointment after a long line of costly failures.

A study on the origin of Covid-19 provided new evidence on Thursday supporting the theory that humans first caught the virus from infected animals at a Chinese market in late 2019.

Nearly five years after Covid first emerged, the international community has not been able to determine with certainty exactly where the virus came from.

Half a century of advancements in biomedical science paved the way for today's powerful weight-loss drugs like Ozempic -- so what was that journey like for the scientists involved?

Joel Habener of Massachusetts General Hospital and Svetlana Mojsov of The Rockefeller University, who are being honored with the prestigious Lasker Award for their role in the research, spoke to AFP about how they made the discoveries that changed the way we think about weight.

Extreme drought affecting large parts of South America has dramatically reduced the flow of the Amazon River where Colombia borders Peru and Brazil, choking food supplies and threatening residents' health.

"The Amazon is drying up," the mayor of the Colombian border town of Leticia, which lies on the smaller of two branches of the river that flow through the Three Frontiers area, complained to AFP.

New, more expensive migraine drugs are no more effective against the throbbing headaches than traditional painkillers, and even performed worse than an older range of treatments called triptans, said a massive global analysis Thursday.

Migraines are severe, often disabling headaches which affect at least one in seven adults globally, according to the World Health Organization. They are also up to three times more common in women than men.

For the past few years, a series of controversies have rocked the well-established field of cosmology. In a nutshell, the predictions of the standard model of the universe appear to be at odds with some recent observations.

There are heated debates about whether these observations are biased, or whether the cosmological model, which predicts the structure and evolution of the entire universe, may need a rethink. Some even claim that cosmology is in crisis. Right now, we do not know which side will win. But excitingly, we are on the brink of finding that out.

To be fair, controversies are just the normal course of the scientific method. And over many years, the standard cosmological model has had its share of them. This model suggests the universe is made up of 68.3% “dark energy” (an unknown substance that causes the universe’s expansion to accelerate), 26.8% dark matter (an unknown form of matter) and 4.9% ordinary atoms, very precisely measured from the cosmic microwave background – the afterglow of radiation from the Big Bang.

People often think of all whales as giants of the sea when in fact they vary in size dramatically, from the 30-meter blue whale to the two-meter dwarf sperm whale. However, almost all of the largest family by size, the baleen whales, are massive – and scientists have only recently understood how they grew so big.

Adding to this understanding, a new study may help explain a longstanding puzzle in science about how baleen whales can have such a high cell reproduction rate without succumbing to cancer – a problem known as “Peto’s Paradox”.

More than 3,600 chemicals used in food packaging or preparation have been detected in human bodies, some of which are hazardous to health, while little is known about others, a study said Tuesday.

Around 100 of these chemicals are considered to be of "high concern" to human health, said lead study author Birgit Geueke from the Food Packaging Forum Foundation, a Zurich-based NGO.