The James Webb Space Telescope’s latest imagery is its most “cerebral” yet, capturing a dying star’s nebula that looks uncannily like a brain inside a transparent skull. Located about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation of Vela, the Sails, the nebula is officially called PMR 1. It is named after the astronomers who discovered it
A total lunar eclipse will be visible across North America in the early hours of March 3, 2026, turning the full Moon a deep red during its peak totality — popularly known as a “Blood Moon.” According to NASA, this will be the first total lunar eclipse visible in the Americas since March 2025. What
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Humans and Neanderthals cozied up from time to time when they lived in the same areas tens of thousands of years ago. But we don’t know much about who got with whom, or why. A new genetic analysis offers some ancient gossip: The pairings were more often female
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The United States Space Force has been testing its top-secret Boeing X-37B space plane for over a decade. Two versions of the unusual spacecraft have completed seven orbital missions over the last 15 years, spending a combined thousands
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully delivered two national security satellites to orbit earlier this month but suffered an anomaly that caused one of the boosters to emit an unusual plume of debris. Now, the U.S. Space Force has paused all military launches aboard the rocket until the issue is resolved. The
A glacier on Antarctica’s Eastern Peninsula underwent the most rapid retreat seen in modern times. In only two months, nearly half of Hektoria Glacier broke apart and disappeared. New research led by the University of Colorado Boulder and published in Nature Geoscience explains what happened in 2023, when the glacier lost about eight kilometers of
There are some things in life that many people just don’t think to question. Water wets things. Gravity sucks. And cellophane tape screams when you peel it. Unlike the intricacies of gravity, though, the screaming of tape has now been explained. A team of physicists led by Er Qiang Li of the University of Science
For decades, Mars has been seen as a cold, radiation-blasted desert where any trace of life would have long since vanished. Yet beneath its frozen surface, vast reservoirs of ice may be quietly preserving a biological record stretching back millions of years. Locked within these ancient ice deposits, the chemical building blocks of life could
Astronomers have witnessed one of our universe’s biggest stars transforming into a rare stellar body, and the dramatic metamorphosis may be the prequel to a powerful supernova explosion that sees this star birth a black hole. The doomed star in question is WOH G64 (also known as IRAS 04553–6825), located in a satellite galaxy of
Sentef, M. A., Ruggenthaler, M. & Rubio, A. Cavity quantum-electrodynamical polaritonically enhanced electron-phonon coupling and its influence on superconductivity. Sci. Adv. 4, eaau6969 (2018). Article ADS CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar Ruggenthaler, M., Tancogne-Dejean, N., Flick, J., Appel, H. & Rubio, A. From a quantum-electrodynamical light–matter description to novel spectroscopies. Nat. Rev. Chem. 2,