Science

NASA admitted on Wednesday there was "tension" during meetings with Boeing executives about how to bring home two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, but denied reports of shouting matches.

The US space agency is enlisting SpaceX to rescue the astronauts because of safety concerns with Boeing's Starliner capsule, which encountered thruster malfunctions and helium leaks on its way to the orbital outpost.

France's newest nuclear reactor, plagued by massive delays and cost overruns, shut itself down automatically Wednesday just a day after starting up for the first time.

The European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) in Flamanville, Normandy is going through a "long and complex startup process requiring many trials and tests, and that can induce shutdowns like this," a spokeswoman for state-owned energy giant EDF told AFP.

The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission, a multiday orbital expedition set to feature the first-ever spacewalk by private citizens, is now scheduled to launch on Friday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

An operations plan released by the agency indicates a four-hour launch window opening at 3:33 am (0733 GMT) on Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, with backup opportunities on Saturday and Sunday. Elon Musk's company has not yet commented on the new launch window.

As darkness falls, the nocturnal half of the animal kingdom starts its day. Nocturnal species are perfectly adapted to navigate and survive the dark of night that has existed for countless millions of years.

What happens to these creatures when the darkness they call home is transformed by streetlights and other artificial night lighting?

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.

What’s the difference between an asteroid and a comet? A comet is basically a dirty iceball composed of rock and ice. The classic image is of a bright “star” in the night sky with a long curved tail extending into space. This is what happens when they approach the Sun and start emitting gases and releasing dust. It normally continues until there’s nothing left but rock or until they fragment into dust.

Asteroids, on the other hand, are primarily just rocks. They might conjure up notions of Hans Solo steering the Millennium Falcon through an implausibly dense “asteroid field” to escape a swarm of TIE Fighters, but mostly they just quietly orbit the Sun, minding their own business.

The idea that aliens may have visited the Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of UK citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7% believe that they have seen a UFO.

The figures are even higher in the US – and rising. The number of people who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life increased from 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022. Some 24% of Americans say they’ve seen a UFO.

Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there's a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world's largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

About 2,890 kilometers beneath our feet lies a gigantic ball of liquid metal: our planet’s core. Scientists like me use the seismic waves created by earthquakes as a kind of ultrasound to “see” the shape and structure of the core.

Using a new way of studying these waves, my colleague Xiaolong Ma and I have made a surprising discovery: there is a large donut-shaped region of the core around the Equator, a few hundred kilometres thick, where seismic waves travel about 2% slower than in the rest of the core.

Optical illusions, quantum mechanics and neural networks might seem to be quite unrelated topics at first glance. However, in new research I have used a phenomenon called “quantum tunnelling” to design a neural network that can “see” optical illusions in much the same way humans do.

My neural network did well at simulating human perception of the famous Necker cube and Rubin’s vase illusions – and in fact better than some much larger conventional neural networks used in computer vision.

Hundreds of endangered Australian Green and Golden Bell frogs huddle inside a sauna, shielded from Sydney's winter chill.

The sauna -– a small greenhouse containing black-painted bricks warmed by the sun -- may be pleasant, but it also protects the frogs from a deadly chytrid fungus that would otherwise drive them to extinction.

Naming others is considered a marker of highly advanced cognition in social animals, previously observed only in humans, bottlenose dolphins and African elephants.

Marmoset monkeys have now joined this exclusive club, according to a new study published in Science on Thursday.

Mammals, from the mighty blue whale to the tiny shrew, inhabit nearly every corner of our planet. Their remarkable adaptability to different environments has long fascinated scientists, with each species developing unique traits to survive and thrive.

Despite such vast biological diversity, it was believed until recently that the structure and function of the heart across mammals was the same. But research from my colleagues and I reveals that the human heart is an outlier, distinctly different from those of our closest relatives, the great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas.