Technology

The European Union wants to bolster its capacity to launch small satellites into space with a new launchpad in Arctic Sweden.Read here: Poland inches closer to access European Union aid with this first stepEuropean officials and Swedish…

How Far the Light ReachesSabrina ImblerLittle, Brown & Co., $27 In How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler shows us that the ocean, in all its mystery and dazzling glory, is queer — that is, the life that takes shape…

“Good” and “bad” cholesterol: These well-known characters have long starred in the saga of heart health. But in a major plot twist, “good” cholesterol, it turns out, is not always so good. In the last dozen years or so,…

Galaxies that helped transform the early universe may have been small, round and green. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted “Green Pea” galaxies dating to 13.1 billion years ago. These viridescent…

SEATTLE — Attention alien hunters: If you want to find life on distant planets, try looking for signs of toxic chemical cleanup.  Gases that organisms produce as they tidy up their environments could provide clear signs of life…

In spring 1949, three prospectors armed with Geiger counters set out to hunt for treasure in the arid mountains of southern Nevada and southeastern California. In the previous century, those mountains yielded gold, silver,…

When bitter winds blew and temperatures dropped, my grandmother would urge me to come inside. “You’ll catch your death of cold out there,” she’d say. Sure, freezing to death is possible in frigid temperatures. But doctors and…

Mosquitoes that transmit dengue and other viruses have evolved growing resistance to insecticides in parts of Asia, and novel ways to control them are desperately needed, new research warns. Health authorities commonly fog…

CHICAGO — More than electricity can illuminate a thundercloud. Brilliant bursts of gamma radiation, known as dark lightning or terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, also explode in lightning storms. And on rare occasions, those…

Some fungi that can cause serious lung infections have spread to many parts of the United States. A Science News story on the expanded range of Histoplasma, Coccidioides and Blastomyces fungi hit a nerve with a lot of readers (SN:…

Languishing. The term captured the zeitgeist in April 2021 when organizational psychologist Adam Grant penned an article in the New York Times titled, “There’s a name for the blah you’re feeling: It’s called languishing.”…

Astronomers have discovered more than 200 distant variable stars known as RR Lyrae stars in the Milky Way's stellar halo. The most distant of these stars is more than a million light-years from Earth, almost half the distance to our…

Long-distance supply chains, vulnerable to disruptions from wars and disease outbreaks, may have formed millennia before anyone today gasped at gas prices or gawked at empty store shelves. Roughly 3,650 to 3,200 years ago,…

Molecular biology’s flower child — Science News, January 6, 1973       During the past several years, some artificial genes have been synthesized…. But no one had unraveled a real gene that dictates the production of a protein.…

AP | | Posted by Yagya Sharma After almost 40 years circling Earth, a retired NASA science satellite plunged harmlessly through the atmosphere off the coast of Alaska, NASA reported Monday.The Defense Department confirmed that the…

Tubular laser beams can create what amount to fiber-optic cables made of thin air, researchers report in a study to appear in Physical Review X. Laser-heated air can efficiently transmit light signals without the need to lay…

If your alertness and reaction speed fluctuate more than usual, you may be more vulnerable to a viral disease.The study was led by experts from the University of Michigan, who collaborated closely with colleagues from Duke University…

AP | | Posted by Nisha Anand A 38-year-old retired NASA satellite is about to fall from the sky. NASA said Friday the chance of wreckage falling on anybody is “very low.” Most of the 5,400-pound (2,450-kilogram) satellite will burn…

Cape Canaveral: A 38-year-old retired NASA satellite is about to fall from the sky. NASA said Friday the chance of wreckage falling on anybody is "very low." Most of the 5,400-pound (2,450-kilogram) satellite will burn up upon reentry,…

Olmec and Maya people living along Mexico’s Gulf Coast as early as 3,100 years ago built star-aligned ceremonial centers to track important days of a 260-day calendar, a new study finds. The oldest written evidence of this…

Cheese making has been around for thousands of years, and there are now more than 1,000 varieties of cheese worldwide. But what exactly makes some cheeses like Parmesan taste fruity and others, such as Brie and Camembert, taste…

Tiny drops of dirty water, often mistaken for air bubbles, tell the tale of rippling icicle growth. Icicles made of pure water are smooth. But salt or other impurities make icicles develop ripples as they hang from branches,…

Given enough time, jumping beans will always find their way out of the sun. Jumping beans, which are really seed pods with twitchy moth larvae inside, hop around in a way that — if they live long enough — is guaranteed to…

CHICAGO — Indigenous people in the Amazon may have been deliberately creating fertile soil for farming for thousands of years. At archaeological sites across the Amazon River basin, mysterious patches of unusually fertile soil…

Before a winter storm, adding salt on a road alters when the ice will form. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have applied this basic concept to develop a new heating and cooling…

A Voice in the WildernessJoseph L. Graves Jr.Basic Books, $30 It’s both good and bad that the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology is not a long-ago hidden figure but a contemporary scientist. On the…

Three types of fungi that cause serious lung infections and were once thought to be confined to certain regions of the United States are now widespread. In 1955, Histoplasma fungi grew mainly in Midwest soil and in parts of the…

American space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shared the full list of all important astronomical events lined up in January, with interesting space observations to look forward to.A comet, Venus crossing…

If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole in space, you won’t be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But you may have just enough time to send a message to the rest of us from the other side, researchers report in the…

Living through the COVID-19 pandemic may have matured teens’ brains beyond their years. From online schooling and social isolation to economic hardship and a mounting death count, the last few years have been rough on young…