Science

Only about 600 people have ever traveled to space. The vast majority of astronauts over the past six decades have been middle-aged men on short-duration missions of fewer than 20 days.

Today, with private, commercial and multinational spaceflight providers and flyers entering the market, we are witnessing a new era of human spaceflight. Missions have ranged from minutes, hours and days to months.

Amazon has secured a A$2 billion contract with the Australian Signals Directorate – the agency responsible for foreign signals intelligence and information security. A local subsidiary of Amazon Web Services will build a Top Secret Cloud to provide secure data storage for military intelligence.

The deal will securely manage top secret data vital to Australia’s national security. This contract is expected to last over a decade. It will build three secure data centres at undisclosed locations in Australia.

The World Meteorological Organization, which is tracking Hurricane Beryl's deadly course through the Caribbean, told AFP that more storms with its hallmarks could be expected in the future.

The WMO, the United Nations' weather and climate agency, said the record-breaking tropical cyclone intensified rapidly, picking up energy over a warmer Atlantic Ocean and developing into a system with lots of heavy rain.

Common foods including white rice and eggs are linked to higher levels of "forever chemicals" in the body, new research from scientists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth shows.

The researchers also found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in people who consumed coffee, red meat, and seafood, based on plasma and breast milk samples of 3,000 pregnant people. The findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, add to the mounting evidence of the accumulation of PFAS, which were developed by chemical companies in the mid-20th century, in the natural environment and the body.

More than 700,000 hectares of forest in Indonesia have been cleared for mining since 2001, including large tracts of primary forest, a new analysis using satellite data has found.

The TreeMap, a conservation start-up, used high-resolution imagery from several satellites and two decades of data from the long-running Landsat program to map mines and related infrastructure and track deforestation.

Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate as a wildfire rages out of control in northern California, with the region gripped by an "exceptionally dangerous" heatwave that is making conditions worse.

More than 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) of grass and woodland have been consumed since Tuesday when a blaze started just outside Oroville, with authorities telling 13,000 people to leave the area.

Far from her home in the tourist mecca of Tenerife, Cati Padilla is one of the growing number of travellers escaping heatwaves for cooler holidays in Nordic countries.

Countries like Norway and Sweden in northern Europe are now promoting "coolcations" to attract visitors to their temperate climates.

A brief boat ride from the thrumming nightclubs of Mykonos lies the UNESCO heritage site of Delos, one of the most important sanctuaries of the ancient Greek and Roman world.

Surrounded by piercing azure waters, Delos' 2,000-year-old buildings offer a microcosm of information on daily life during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

A video of 19-month-old Orla from Liverpool has gone viral, reaching more than 19 million views on TikTok. In the clip, babysitter Olayka is trying to coax Orla into having a nap. Orla, however, wants to stay up and protests in babbling sounds – with a distinct Liverpool English (“scouse”) accent.

Behind this adorable exchange, important processes of language acquisition are at work. Here is what science says about the importance of babbling and how it is linked to accents.

When people think of honey bees, they often think of classic wooden hives, in which beekeepers are having to breed more and more bees just to keep managed populations stable. These man-made boxes, designed to facilitate pollination and honey production in an era before animal welfare was considered, are the hives in which scientists study honey bees.

However, these boxes have little in common with the wild nests that featured in honey bee evolution. Are we are missing something from the evolution of wild bees that might help managed bees today?

Texas weather extremes likely to become normal, scientists say

"Texas weather extremes likely to become normal, scientists say" 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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Giant spiky cacti tower over farmer Alcides Peixinho Nascimento, 70, one of the residents of Brazil's unique Caatinga biome who is on a mission to plant native vegetation in a bid to halt desertification.

"In the absence of laws, it is up to us to act," said Nascimento, who is trying to regenerate his land by planting mandacaru, an emblematic cactus from the region that grows up to six meters tall.