NEW YORK (AP) — By age 2, most kids know how to play pretend. They turn their bedrooms into faraway castles and hold make-believe tea parties. The ability to make something out of nothing may seem uniquely human — a bedrock of creativity that’s led to new kinds of art, music and more. READ MORE:
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have mapped the largest section of the universe’s dark matter yet, deepening our understanding of how this mysterious substance shapes the cosmic landscape. Dark matter is notoriously difficult to study because it does not interact with light. Astronomers can detect it only by looking at its gravitational
The Artemis programme is NASA’s renewed effort to not only return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, but ultimately to establish a permanent lunar base. This sustained presence on the Moon is seen as a key stepping stone for human missions to Mars and beyond. This base will
New research examining the diet of Japanese giant salamanders has revealed that these enormous river-dwelling amphibians experience a dramatic change in what they eat as they grow. Endemic to Japan, the immense animals can reach up to 1.5 metres in length and weigh up to 25 kilograms. According to researchers at the University of Liège
NASA will stream live coverage of the upcoming prelaunch, launch, and docking activities for the agency’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station. Liftoff is targeted for no earlier than 6:01 a.m. EST on Wednesday, Feb. 11, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The targeted docking time
The Thwaites Glacier, often called the “Doomsday Glacier” for its potential to drastically raise sea levels, has been the focus of an ambitious study led by researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI). In an effort to understand the glacier’s melting process, a team of scientists drilled into
A rough diamond unearthed in Botswana in the final quarter of 2025 has drawn sustained attention from geoscientists and gemological laboratories worldwide. The 37.41-carat crystal features a highly uncommon internal division: one half displays a vivid pink hue, the other remains entirely colorless. The stark planar boundary between the two zones is physically intact and
“He puts forward logical alternative hypotheses,” said Cahill of Novoplansky’s critique. “The original work should have tested among a number of different hypotheses rather than focusing on a single interpretation. This is in part what makes it pseudoscience and promoting a worldview.” Granted, “[p]lants have extensive and well established mechanisms of communication, with that of
The world is home to some truly extraordinary trees. Some grow almost entirely beneath the ground, others are poisonous, and there’s one that’s estimated to be almost 5,000 years old. Then there are the big ones – the really big ones. Some of these titans rise more than 100 metres into the sky, while other
In astrophysics, extreme events may call for extreme interpretations. Sometimes, that means weighing every possible option for what something could have been—or what it could explain. In 2023, a detector buried off the Mediterranean Sea spotted an impossibly powerful neutrino signal—tens of thousands of times more energetic than anything produced by humanity’s most powerful particle