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Explanation: What's happening in the sky this unusual night? Most striking in the featured 4.5-hour 360-degree panoramic video, perhaps, is the pink and purple aurora. That's because this night, encompassing May 11, was famous for its auroral skies around the world. As the night progresses, auroral bands shimmer, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy rises, and stars shift as the Earth rotates beneath them. Captured here simultaneously is a rare red band running above the aurora: a SAR arc, seen to change only slightly. The flashing below the horizon is caused by passing cars, while the moving spots...

Float like a butterfly, sniff out cancer like a bee? Honeybees can detect the subtle scents of lung cancer in the lab — and even the faint aroma of disease that can waft from a patient’s breath. Inspired by the insects’ exquisite olfactory abilities, scientists hooked the brains of living bees up to electrodes, passed different scents under the insects’ antennae and then recorded their brain signals. “It’s very clear — like day and night — whether [a bee] is responding to a chemical or not,” says Debajit Saha, a neural engineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Different...

Playing catch-up with the likes of SpaceX, China has announced the successful test flight and landing of a reusable rocket. On June 23, 2024, the liquid-fueled launcher rose to a height of 7.5miles (12 km) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Vertical landing rockets have been around since the Apollo days, but it's only in the last decade that companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have turned them into a game changer. By recovering a booster intact instead of crashing into the ocean, a very large part of launch costs can be saved. It also allows for economies of scale...

Galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746, the foreground object that created the gravitational lens. Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Bradley (STScI), A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the Cosmic Spring collaboration =============================================================================== Astronomers have discovered the most distant, and so the oldest, known stellar clusters. This is the first time astronomers have seen star clusters from before the first half a billion years of the Universe. The light of these gravitationally bound groups of stars comes to us from just 460 million years after the Big Bang. Two factors have been crucial to the discovery. The extremely keen infrared eye of...

Could Comet A3 become another Great Comet, or even simply reach naked-eye brightness? We'll find out in autumn 2024... Have you heard about Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) yet? Comet observers are all hoping for big things from comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) in autumn 2024. When it was discovered, it was hailed as a potential ‘comet of the century’ and calculations suggested it might become as bright as mag. -4! It’s now thought that at best A3 will reach mag. +0.4, a lot fainter but still much brighter than the last really bright comet, C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), which delighted sky-watchers in...

String theory scientists studying the behavior of high energy particles say they have stumbled upon a mathematical “hack” that revealed a whole new way to represent the irrational number Pi. While the research is purely theoretical, the duo behind the Pi hack says this kind of theoretical work holds rewarding potential. The researchers also believe their work could lead to a number of potential breakthroughs in the future, similar to how theoretical breakthroughs made by physicists nearly a hundred years ago resulted in technological advancements decades later. AFTER 4,000 YEARS, PI IS STILL A MYSTERY Defined as the ratio of...

If Southern Utah residents were confused during a recent police manhunt for a double murder suspect, it wasn’t exactly their fault. They were given faulty information by police and media who chose to identify the 28 year old transgender-identified suspect as a woman rather than a biological male. The suspect, born Collin Bailey, is accused of shooting his parents Joseph and Gail Bailey to death in their Washington City, Utah home on June 18 and attempting to shoot his brother Cory through a door. Police issued a shelter-in-place order for residents in the Southern Utah community and official reports told...

SpaceX may be forced to come to the rescue of two astronauts stranded at the International Space Station after their Boeing Starliner suffered troubling helium leaks. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams soared into space on the Starliner on June 5 and were only supposed to remain at the ISS for nine days — but issues with their ship have left their return date still up in the air, and NASA is now furiously trying to help solve the problem. Boeing-rival SpaceX could potentially end up being tapped to ultimately bring them home aboard its Crew Dragon spaceship. The outcome...

Secondhand electric cars are now cheaper than their gas counterparts for the first time - and the gap is widening quickly. This is according to a new study from comparison site iSeeCars, which found the cost of an average used EV dropped $265 below a typical gas car in February. This marked the beginning of the trend - and the price gap has grown to $2,657 as of latest data from May. In the last year, average used car values have dropped between 3 and 7 percent, the report found, while used EV values have plummeted between 29 and 39...

Explanation: What is that strange brown ribbon on the sky? When observing the star cluster NGC 4372, observers frequently take note of an unusual dark streak nearby running about three degrees in length. The streak, actually a long molecular cloud, has become known as the Dark Doodad Nebula. (Doodad is slang for a thingy or a whatchamacallit.) Pictured here, the Dark Doodad Nebula sweeps across the center of a rich and colorful starfield. Its dark color comes from a high concentration of interstellar dust that preferentially scatters visible light. The globular star cluster NGC 4372 is visible as the fuzzy...

Quantum entanglement in top quarks has been demonstrated, according to physicists at CERN who say the discovery offers new insights into the behavior of fundamental particles and their interactions at distances that cannot be attained by light-speed communication. The research, led by University of Rochester professor Regina Demina, extends the phenomenon known as “spooky action at a distance” to the heaviest particles recognized by physicists and offers important new insights into high-energy quantum mechanics. Initially discovered almost three decades ago, top quarks are the most massive elementary particles that have been observed. The mass of these unique particles originates from...

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps (center) is pictured assisting NASA astronauts Mike Barratt (left) and Tracy C. Dyson (right) inside the Quest airlock. Image Credit: NASA TV ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt were supposed to go on a spacewalk on Monday, June 24 – but a fault led to the expected 6-and-a-half-hour walk being cut down to just 31 minutes. There was a water leak from the service and cooling umbilical unit on Dyson’s spacesuit that was described on the live stream by Dyson as spreading water "everywhere" in the airlock. The pair had already switched to...

China's lunar probe has returned to Earth with the first ever samples from the Moon's unexplored far side. The Chang'e-6 landed in the Inner Mongolia desert on Tuesday, after a nearly two-month long mission which was fraught with risks. Scientists are eagerly awaiting the Chang’e-6 as the samples could answer key questions about how planets are formed. China is the only country to have landed on the far side of the Moon, having done so before in 2019. The far side - which faces away from Earth - is technically challenging to reach due to its distance, and its difficult...

A rock core in a sample tube, with Martian atmosphere in its “headspace.” Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS The Perseverance rover has been toiling on the Martian surface for over three years, collecting rock samples that will eventually be brought to Earth if all goes according to plan. But the rover has also picked up hitchhikers, in the form of traces of Martian atmosphere that are squeezed into the “headspace” of the sample tubes. That’s very exciting for atmospheric scientists, who so far have only studied Mars’ air remotely, whether from orbiters characterizing the planet from on high or from rovers delivering readouts...

On her first day after moving from Australia to the United States, Elizabeth Dunford walked into a supermarket to buy bread. As a researcher of food additives, she instinctively glanced at the ingredients label.“Why are there so many additives?” she exclaimed in surprise. Nearly every loaf she picked up contained ingredients that made her uneasy. After lingering by the shelves, she reluctantly chose a bag.“At that moment, I thought: It looks like I will have to choose the best from the worst when shopping in the future,” Ms. Dunford, project consultant for The George Institute for Global Health and adjunct...

Time has puzzled scientists for many decades. Does it meaningfully exist apart from our experience of it as everything moves toward the disintegration of entropy along its irrefutable arrow? You can’t put the “spilled milk” of the weirdness of time back in the jug. In new research published in the American Physical Society's peer-reviewed journal Physical Review A, scientists from Italy (led by Alessandro Coppo) try to translate one theory of time into real life—or, at least, closer to it. The theory is called Page and Wootters mechanism, and Coppo has studied it for years. It’s a quantum mechanics idea...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. An extinct ribbonlike sea creature about the size of a human hand was one of the earliest animals to evolve a precursor of a backbone. Scientists recently identified the animal’s nerve cord by using a topsy-turvy twist. They turned its fossils upside down. Paleontologist Charles Doolittle Wolcott first encountered fossils of Pikaia in the Burgess Shale deposits of British Columbia, dating to 508 million years ago, and described them in a 1911 treatise. The animal measured roughly 6.3 inches (16...

Explanation: What if we could see back to the beginning of the universe? We could see galaxies forming. But what did galaxies look like back then? These questions took a step forward recently with the release of the analysis of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image that included the most distant object yet discovered. Most galaxies formed at about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, but some formed earlier. Pictured in the inset box is JADES-GS-z14-0, a faint smudge of a galaxy that formed only 300 million years after the universe started. In technical terms, this galaxy lies...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured striking new images of the Serpens Nebula that reveal a rare alignment of stellar jets, offering new insights into the formation of stars. Protostellar outflows occur when high-speed jets of hot gas produced by young stars collide with surrounding dust and gases. In the new Webb images, several outflows spotted in the northern area of the Serpens Nebula appear to all be aligned and oriented in the same direction. Located around 1,300 light-years from Earth, the Serpens Nebula is a dense cluster of young stars, some of which are only about 100,000 years...

Hospitalization risk 80% higher versus nonusersCannabis use was significantly associated with a greater risk of severe outcomes following a COVID-19 infection, according to a retrospective study that spanned the first 2 years of the pandemic. Among more than 70,000 patients with a documented case of COVID at a large medical center in the Midwest, use of cannabis was linked with an 80% greater risk of hospitalization and a 27% higher risk for intensive care unit (ICU) admission after an infection, but no difference in all-cause mortality: Hospitalization: OR 1.80 (95% CI 1.68-1.93) ICU admission: OR 1.27 (95% CI 1.14-1.41) Mortality:...