Science

On this day, February 29, conversations the world over may conjure the name of Pope Gregory XIII – widely known for his reform of the calendar that bears his name.

The need for calendar reform was driven by the inaccuracy of the Julian calendar. Introduced in 46 BC, the Julian calendar fell short of the solar year – the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun – by about 12 minutes each year.

Three American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut blasted off Sunday night from Florida for a six-month mission on the International Space Station.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 10:53 pm (0353 GMT Monday) from the Kennedy Space Center, lighting up the night sky with a long, bright plume of orange flame.

Christopher Nolan's $1 billion-grossing "Oppenheimer" hasn't just lined the pockets of Hollywood studio executives -- it has also brought an unexpected windfall to the secretive community of Los Alamos.

The movie, the clear frontrunner to win best picture at the Oscars on March 10, tells the story of the invention of the atomic bomb.

Elon Musk has launched a legal case against OpenAI, the AI firm he helped to set up in 2015, accusing its leaders of a "betrayal" of its founding mission.

The tycoon, who left OpenAI in 2018, argued in documents filed in a San Francisco court late Thursday that the firm was always intended as a non-profit entity.

When analyzing a set of data, one of the first steps many people take is to compute an average. You might compare your height against the average height of people where you live, or brag about your favorite baseball player’s batting average. But while the average can help you study a dataset, it has important limitations.

Uses of the average that ignore these limitations have led to serious issues, such as discrimination, injury and even life-threatening accidents.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 ended the federal right to abortion, legislative attention has extended to many other aspects of reproductive rights, including access to assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, or IVF, after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February 2024.

University of Massachusetts Lowell associate professor and department chair of the school of nursing Heidi Collins Fantasia explains how this decades-old procedure works and what its tenuous legal status means for prospective parents.

Their mission around the Moon is not expected until September 2025 at the earliest, but the four astronauts on NASA's Artemis II mission are already preparing for their splashdown return.

Over the past week, the three Americans and one Canadian chosen for the historic Moon mission have been training at sea with the US Navy off the coast of California.

The Italian island of Sicily has declared a state of emergency over a drought which has withered crops, desiccated pastures and led to water restrictions.

Experts say climate change driven by human activity is boosting the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts and wildfires.

Do you ever feel spacey, distracted and worn down toward the end of a long work-related task – especially if that task is entirely a mental one? For over a century, psychologists have been trying to determine whether mental fatigue is fundamentally similar to physical fatigue or whether it is governed by different processes.

Some researchers have argued that exerting mental effort depletes a limited supply of energy – the same way physical exertion fatigues muscles. The brain consumes energy in the form of glucose, which can run low.