Science

Scientists on Thursday provided the first look at what they called the “gentle giant” lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, unveiling an image of a supermassive black hole that devours any matter wandering within its gargantuan gravitational pull. The black hole – called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr …

The Moon may look like a big dry ball, but there’s more water up there than you might expect.

While the global sea level is expected to rise 50cm by 2100, for large parts of New Zealand, it could be 1 metre because the land is sinking too. The projections, labelled “a bit terrifying” by one expert, are the result of an extensive five-year, government-funded research programme – NZ …

Analysts say the rate of deforestation indicates the world is not on track to meet COP26 commitments. In 2021, the world lost an area of forest greater than the size of the United Kingdom, according to a report by Global Forest Watch – a trajectory that is set to fall …

A group of Chinese and American paleontologists said they have discovered an ancient fossil group of marine species dating back about 504 million years in Linyi City, east China’s Shandong Province. The fossil assemblage, named “Linyi Lagerstatte” by the researchers, consists of more than 35 extinct species living on the …

Beijing plans to ‘track and attack’ an asteroid to change its orbit as early as 2025, a high-ranking official has said. China seeks to build a system capable of effectively monitoring asteroids and potentially altering their course to protect Earth from a possible impact. The deputy head of China’s National …

Such advertisements will be categorised as inappropriate content. Microblogging platform Twitter on Friday announced that it will ban advertisements that “contradict the scientific consensus” on climate change. “We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” …

A huge eruption on the surface of the sun may have sent a solar storm hurtling towards Earth. Scientists are now working to determine if a potentially disruptive cloud of solar particles is headed toward Earth after a strong solar flare erupted from the sun late on Wednesday night. The …

Three Chinese astronauts returned to earth on Saturday after 183 days in space, state television reported, completing the country’s longest crewed space mission to date. The astronauts landed nine hours after they left a key module of China’s first space station. While in orbit, the Shenzhou-13 mission astronauts took manual …

The U.S. Space Command announced this week that it determined a 2014 meteor hit that hit Earth was from outside the solar system. The meteor streaked across the sky off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea three years earlier than what was believed to be the first confirmed …

New research published in Science Advances describes complex structures in rocks from Quebec, Canada, estimated to be between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years old and of possible organic origin. The structures found in Canada are more than 200 to 700 million years older than the previous oldest fossils of microbes …

Saturn, Mars, Venus and Jupiter are set to line up neatly in the pre-dawn sky later this month in a rare celestial spectacle, astronomers say. Starting April 17, the four planets will appear diagonally, with Jupiter nearest the horizon and Saturn the highest. In the northern hemisphere, they’ll be most …

Martian weather is awfully dusty. A camera aboard NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover — a car-sized robot that’s explored the planet for nearly a decade — recently spotted a dusty wind gust blowing over the red desert. You can see the weather in the footage below, which was captured by one …

Shining only ~300 million years after the Big Bang, it may be home to the oldest stars in the universe. An international team of astronomers has recently spotted the most distant galaxy ever, located about 13.5 billion light-years away. Astronomers named this galaxy HD1, which is exceptionally bright in ultraviolet …

Tiny polymer particles infiltrate the human body to an unforeseen extent Researchers in the UK have discovered microplastics in live lung tissue for the first time, which adds to growing evidence that humans breathe these extremely small particles. The study was published last month in Science of the Total Environment. …

Research by South African scientists suggests that Omicron could displace the Delta variant of the coronavirus because infection with the new variant boosts immunity to the older one. The study only covered a small group of people and has not been peer-reviewed, but it found that people who were infected …

70 wandering ‘rogue’ planets the size of Jupiter in the Milky Way are the largest group ever discovered Astronomers have found dozens of ‘rogue’ exoplanets roaming the Milky Way without a parent star to hold them in orbit. At least 70 such cosmic nomads have been confirmed, but the number …

A new round of nuclear fusion experiments for an advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST), or “Chinese artificial sun,” kicked off at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science this month, Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday. According to the institute’s vice director, Song Yuntao, the experiment is aimed at upgrading the EAST …

A well-preserved dinosaur embryo has been found inside a fossilized egg. The fossilized dinosaur embryo came from Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province in southern China and was acquired by researchers in 2000. Researchers at Yingliang Group, a company that mines stones, suspected it contained egg fossils, but put it in storage for …

Scientists have discovered the first-ever “true” millipede with more than 1,000 legs 60 meters underground in a mining area in Western Australia, setting the record for the creature with the most legs known to humans. Announcing the discovery in the peer-reviewed Scientific Reports journal, the team of researchers revealed that …