Science (General/Chat)
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VIDEO AT LINK................ It’s been 30 years since the discovery of the first planet around another star like our Sun. With every new discovery, scientists move closer to answering whether there are other planets like Earth that could host life as we know it. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries, just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found. The official number of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so...
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Scientists from Kyoto University and Hiroshima University have identified a novel method of understanding the long-elusive W state of quantum entanglement, solving a decades-old challenge and opening new avenues to modern-day advances in quantum teleportation and computing. The phenomenon of quantum entanglement was first described in 1935 by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in what is now known as the EPR paradox. The trio argued against what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance,” the idea that the state of one particle could instantly affect another, no matter how far apart they were. These counterintuitive principles challenged...
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Explanation: Can you spot famous celestial objects in this image? 18th-century astronomer Charles Messier cataloged only two of them: the bright Lagoon Nebula (M8) at the bottom, and the colorful Trifid Nebula (M20) at the upper right. The one on the left that resembles a cat's paw is NGC 6559, and it is much fainter than the other two. Even harder to spot are the thin blue filaments on the left, from supernova remnant (SNR G007.5-01.7). Their glow comes from small amounts of glowing oxygen atoms that are so faint that it took over 17 hours of exposure with just...
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It looked like the Sun was heading toward a historic lull in activity. That trend flipped in 2008, according to new research. The Sun has become increasingly active since 2008, a new NASA study shows. Solar activity is known to fluctuate in cycles of 11 years, but there are longer-term variations that can last decades. Case in point: Since the 1980s, the amount of solar activity had been steadily decreasing all the way up to 2008, when solar activity was the weakest on record. At that point, scientists expected the Sun to be entering a period of historically low activity....
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A rare cosmic configuration: An Einstein Cross with five points of light, instead of the usual four, has been discovered by scientists. (Credit: Nicolás Lira Turpaud (ALMA Observatory) & adapted from Cox et al. 2025) Brightest Glimpse Yet Of Dark Matter Comes From Rare Cosmic Lens In A Nutshell * Astronomers discovered HerS-3 forming a rare Einstein Cross with five images instead of four. * Computer models required a hidden dark matter halo of 1.6–10 trillion solar masses to explain the pattern. * The galaxy is magnified 17–19 times, revealing rapid star formation and high-speed gas outflows. * This is...
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1:45 Look at 3I Atlas at 12 O'Clock and Swan at 6 O'Clock (think strategic)🚨
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Someone's lunch was full of whole grains.Up in the high passes of the Bernese Alps, a team of researchers found a box. It was about 8 inches in diameter and made of pine, willow, and larch. It was 4,000 years old.Now, the scientists report in a new paper, published in Scientific Reports, they have discovered traces of what was once held in the box -- someone's lunch (or dinner or breakfast).The team thought that the box might have held porridge and looked for traces of milk. But they found nothing. Instead, using a newly developed technique, they were able to...
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Archaeologists investigating a site in the West Kazakhstan Region identified an array of mysterious and intriguing burial mounds that is considered to be one of the country's most significant archaeological discoveries in recent years, Azernews reports. The team located approximately 150 tombs unlike any found before in the area, which may offer new insights into Kazakhstan's early civilizations. While circular kurgans, or burial mounds, are common throughout the region, the recently discovered monuments took a variety of forms, including rectangular mounds and some formed by two interconnected rings -- a rare configuration in Eurasian steppe archaeology. The largest one, which...
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Al Jazeera reports that a historic drought in northern Iraq has lowered water levels in the country's largest reservoir, unexpectedly revealing parts of a 2,300-year-old ancient cemetery. An archaeological team investigated approximately 40 tombs around the edges of the Mosul Dam Lake near the Tigris River. Researchers were first made aware of the potential site in 2023 when a survey identified a few graves, but it was only during the recent dry spell that they realized how extensive it really was. "The droughts have a significant impact on many aspects, like agriculture and electricity," said Bekas Brefkany, the director of...
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Because of Southeast Asia’s harsh climatic and soil conditions, human remains decay quickly and rarely survive. It was a great shock, then, when archaeologists excavating the Thung Binh 1 cave near Hoa Lu unearthed the bones of an individual who lived around 12,000 years ago, Science News Today reports. Further inspection of the surviving skeletal fragments revealed an even bigger surprise. The 35-year-old man, known as TBH1, may have been the victim of an assault that ultimately cost him his life. Researchers noticed a fractured rib near his neck, and alongside it a tiny flake of sharpened quartz lodged in...
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Explanation: A newly discovered comet is already visible with binoculars. The comet, C/2025 R2 (SWAN) and nicknamed SWAN25B, is brightening significantly as it emerges from the Sun's direction and might soon become visible on your smartphone -- if not your eyes. Although the brightnesses of comets are notoriously hard to predict, many comets appear brighter as they approach the Earth, with SWAN25B reaching only a quarter of the Earth-Sun distance near October 19. Nighttime skygazers will also be watching for a SWAN25B-spawned meteor shower around October 5 when our Earth passes through the plane of the comet's orbit. The unexpectedly...
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In 2023, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, 613,349 Americans died of cancer. That number is projected to increase to over 618,000 this year. As a result, medical research has been focused on the development of cancer treatment protocols for decades for all types of cancer.The National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Trials Support Unit (CTSU) and the National Institute of Health’s ClinicalTrials.gov website list hundreds of active protocols, with 457 NCI-supported protocols noted in clinical trial databases for various cancer types and stages.For example, there are approximately a dozen known treatment protocols for Stage 4 prostate cancer that focus...
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Imagine looking up during a total lunar eclipse, expecting the moon to turn deep red—and then you notice a faint green glow from a mysterious visitor not from our solar system. That’s exactly what happened with 3I/ATLAS, and its unexpected color shift is opening a window into new comet chemistry and the nature of interstellar visitors. What is 3I/ATLAS and What Has Been Seen So Far 3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed interstellar object (ISO) ever observed, and it’s behaving in ways that are surprising astronomers. Discovered on July 1, 2025, by the survey system ATLAS in Chile, 3I/ATLAS has been...
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Meet Neutron, Rocket Lab's new reusable medium-lift rocket that will deliver a cost-effective, reliable, and responsive launch service for missions to the International Space Station and low Earth orbit, as well as to explore beyond Earth and on to the Moon and Mars. Rocket Lab | This is Neutron | 8:46 Rocket Lab | 195K subscribers | 162,160 views | September 3, 2025 wiki-wacky: [snip] Neutron is a partially reusable medium-lift two-stage launch vehicle under development by Rocket Lab... designed to be capable of delivering a payload of 13,000 kg (28,700 lb) to low Earth orbit in a partially reusable...
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Explanation: Can our Sun become dangerous? Yes, sometimes. Every few years our Sun ejects a scary-large bubble of hot gas into the Solar System. Every hundred years or so, when the timing, location, and magnetic field connections are just right, such a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) will hit the Earth. When this happens, the Earth not only experiences dramatic auroras, but its magnetic field gets quickly pushed back and compressed, which causes electric grids to surge. Some of these surges could be dangerous, affecting satellites and knocking out power grids -- which can take months to fix. Just such a...
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When Americans hear about carbon dioxide (CO2), it’s often shown as a harmful pollutant that threatens the planet. Politicians, activists, and media outlets warn that if we don’t reduce emissions right away, disaster will happen. Preeminent “climate scientist” Al Gore told Congress in 2007, “The science is settled. Carbon dioxide emissions - from cars, power plants, buildings, and other sources - are heating the Earth's atmosphere.” He continued warning, “The planet has a fever.”What if the fever is instead a cold plunge? As CNN reminded us earlier this year, “Record-breaking cold: Temperatures to plunge to as much as 50 degrees...
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Researchers have now studied the remains of an infant unearthed during emergency excavations in 2006 at the sacristy of the Siervas de Jesus convent in northwestern Spain, Phys.org reports. What made the initial discovery so unusual was that the infant was actually buried within a building belonging to the former Roman fort of Legio VI Victrix, making it the only child burial ever found in a military context in Iberia. During his reign from 27 b.c. to a.d. 14, the emperor Augustus passed a series of laws that strictly forbade Roman soldiers from marrying during their service time, although these...
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Albanian archaeologists made a surprising discovery near the city of Bulqiza after locals notified authorities about an unusual pile of stone blocks, Reuters reports. When a team from the Institute of Archaeology arrived to investigate the site in the village of Strikçan near the North Macedonia border, they identified the remains of a monumental Roman tomb, the only one ever uncovered in the Balkan country. Measuring 29 feet by 19 feet, the subterranean burial chamber is thought to date to the third or fourth century a.d., when the region was part of the Roman province of Illyricum. Once archaeologists entered...
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Scenes of gladiators battling wild beasts before packed crowds in Roman arenas are common in today's popular culture. Ancient written sources record that one animal commonly chosen for these contests was the brown bear (Ursus arctos), though no direct physical evidence of this had ever been found. However, La Brújula Verde reports, a multidisciplinary research team led by Nemanja Marković of Serbia's Institute of Archaeology has recently confirmed that a fragmented animal skull recovered from the Roman city of Viminacium in eastern Serbia belonged to a brown bear that had suffered years in captivity. The animal bone was originally unearthed...
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Explanation: How does your favorite planet spin? Does it spin rapidly around a nearly vertical axis, or horizontally, or backwards? The featured video animates NASA images of all eight planets in our Solar System to show them spinning side-by-side for an easy comparison. In the time-lapse video, a day on Earth -- one Earth rotation -- takes just a few seconds. Jupiter rotates the fastest, while Venus spins not only the slowest (can you see it?), but backwards. The inner rocky planets across the top underwent dramatic spin-altering collisions during the early days of the Solar System. Why planets spin...
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