In this artistic rendering, two asteroids fly past Earth. An asteroid will whiz harmlessly past Earth Saturday June 29, 2024. With the right equipment and timing, you just might spot it. Called 2024 MK, the space rock will make its closest approach to Earth at 9:46 AM EST (13:46 GMT) passing by at about three-quarters … Read more
The penalty was invented in England on February 14, 1891. It was the last minute of an FA Cup quarter-final between Notts County and Stoke City when a defender for County stopped a shot on the line with his hand. Stoke were awarded a free kick just centimeters from the goal-line, and the goalkeeper, as … Read more
Additive framework for spatiotemporal control of active defects. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2400933121 University of Michigan physicists have devised a way to manipulate active fluids, a type of fluid composed of individual units that can propel themselves independently, by taking advantage of topological defects in the fluids. The researchers … Read more
Illustration of T Coronae Borealis where material from a red giant star pours onto a white dwarf, setting the stage for a humongous stellar explosion. Credit: NASA/Conceptual Image Lab/Goddard Space Flight Center If you peer up at the constellation Corona Borealis—the Northern Crown—over the next several months, you may catch a glimpse: Astronomers predict that … Read more
Predicting when solids will melt is more difficult than you might think r.classen/Shutterstock Physicists may finally have an answer for a seemingly simple question that has remained unanswered for about a century: when does a substance melt? Kostya Trachenko at Queen Mary University of London found it mysterious that “in this age of scientific and … Read more
ARE there vastly many near-duplicates of you reading vastly many near-duplicates of this article in vastly many parallel universes? Is consciousness a fundamental property of all matter? Could reality be a computer simulation? Reader, I can hear your groans from here in California. We are inclined to reject ideas like these on the grounds that … Read more
Plots were sown with between zero and eight native grass species. The study was conducted in a former area of pasture taken over by the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park (Goiás state, Brazil). Its purpose was to analyze the role of biodiversity in resistance to reinvasion of plant communities by exotic species. Credit: Guilherme Mazzochini … Read more
This close-up picture of the fossilized termites shows the parallel positioning of the two individuals encased in the amber. The larger female (left) is still touching the smaller male (right). Credit: Aleš Buček (OIST/The Czech Academy of Sciences) Approximately 38 million years ago two termites were in the middle of courtship behavior when they got … Read more
To make a quantum dot consisting of a perovskite nanocrystal (left) more efficient, researchers have created special molecules (right) that form a protective layer around the quantum dot. Credit: Kovalenko Lab Quantum dots are a kind of artificial atom: just a few nanometers in size and made of semiconductor materials, they can emit light of … Read more
Illustration: Rhett Allain You can see that we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse equal to the distance from the observer’s eyes to the center of the Earth (R + h), with the other two sides being just R and the distance to the horizon (s). Using the Pythagorean theorem, we can solve for … Read more