Science

What was meant to be a weeklong trip to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first NASA astronauts to fly with Boeing could extend to eight months, with the agency considering bringing them home on a SpaceX spaceship.

A final decision on whether to persist with Boeing's troubled Starliner -- which experienced worrying propulsion issues as it flew up to the orbital platform in June -- is expected later this month, officials said Wednesday in a call with reporters.

It is "increasingly likely" 2024 will be the hottest year on record, despite July ending a 13-month streak of monthly temperature records, the EU's climate monitor said Thursday.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last month was the second warmest on record books going back to 1940, only slightly cooler than July 2023.

"I saw everything," says 74-year-old Harry Stackhouse from Illinois, who was awake during his recent kidney transplant. He felt no pain as he chatted with doctors, examined the donor organ, and watched the surgical team staple him back up.

Stackhouse was discharged just 36 hours after the procedure at Northwestern Medicine, which aims to make transplants without risky general anesthesia commonplace.

An insect bites off another insect’s leg. Is this predatory behavior, aggression, defense, competition or something else? In the case of carpenter ants, it’s for the good of the amputee and to the benefit of the colony.

A July 2024 University of Lausanne study found carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) carry out lifesaving amputations on their colony siblings. It is the first known example of a non-human animal amputating limbs to prevent or stop the spread of infection.

There’s a perception that today’s youth are extremely narcissistic – fame-obsessed, selfish and vain. In fact, studies show this is a common view of young people, regardless of the times we live in. But are young people really more narcissistic? New research reveals that, as people age, they do tend to become less narcissistic.

Narcissism is a complex, multi-dimensional personality trait, which captures features beyond vanity and self-absorption. Emerging research suggests there are three different features (called “dimensions”) of narcissism: agentic, antagonistic and neurotic.

Quantum computing promises society-changing breakthroughs in drug development and tackling climate change, and on an unassuming English high street, the race to unleash the latest tech revolution is gathering pace.

The founder of Cambridge-based Riverlane, Steve Brierley, predicts that the technology will have its "Sputnik" breakthrough within years.

Elon Musk recently pronounced that the next Neuralink project will be a “Blindsight” cortical implant to restore vision: “Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.”

Unfortunately, this claim rests on the fallacy that neurons in the brain are like pixels on a screen. It’s not surprising that engineers often assume that “more pixels equals better vision.” After all, that is how monitors and phone screens work.

Over the past 20 years, social media has transformed how we communicate, share information and form social connections. A federal parliamentary committee is currently trying to come to grips with these changes, and work out what to do about them.

The social media platforms where we spend so much time are powered by algorithms that exercise significant control over what content each user sees. But researchers know little specific detail about how they work, and how users experience them.

Sometimes it’s unclear how or why a person died. A detailed examination of the body after death, known as an autopsy or postmortem, can help find answers.

Despite what you may have seen on TV crime shows, most autopsies are minimally invasive; body often stays intact throughout a mostly observational procedure.

Language enables people to transmit thoughts to each other because each person’s brain responds similarly to the meaning of words. In our newly published research, my colleagues and I developed a framework to model the brain activity of speakers as they engaged in face-to-face conversations.

We recorded the electrical activity of two people’s brains as they engaged in unscripted conversations. Previous research has shown that when two people converse, their brain activity becomes coupled, or aligned, and that the degree of neural coupling is associated with better understanding of the speaker’s message.

Lynne Ingram cuts a peaceful figure as she tends to a row of humming beehives in a leafy corner of Somerset, southwest England.

But the master beekeeper, who has been keeping hives for more than 40 years, has found herself in a fight against a tricky and evolving foe -- honey fraudsters.