Science

Science

Dan Brown's latest thriller, The Secret of Secrets, follows neuroscientist Katherine Solomon as she reports how low GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the nervous system, expands consciousness. She states in her research that low levels of GABA enable things like telepathy, remote viewing, and more. She explains that on our deathbeds, we experience a precipitous drop in GABA, revealing to us what lies beyond. Her science leads to a mind-bending cat-and-mouse chase around the most beautiful parts of Prague.

This £6.5m boost shows Britain leading the way in space innovation, said UK space minister Liz Lloyd. From improving mobile coverage to monitoring Earth's forests, these 23 projects will create jobs, strengthen partnerships with our allies and keep the UK at the cutting edge of space technology. It's an exciting time for our space sector and great news for British businesses reaching for the stars.

Now, one physicist has proposed a controversial solution: dark matter is nothing more than an illusion. According to Professor Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa, astronomers haven't been able to find any dark matter particles because they simply do not exist. Instead, Professor Gupta argues that the effects attributed to these 'exotic matters' can be explained by the fundamental forces of the universe changing over time.

In the balmy late summer of 1924, people across the world prepared to receive the first messages from the intelligent alien civilization that was assumed to inhabit Mars. To tune in to these Martian communications, the U.S. military imposed a period of radio silence on the nation that spanned 36 hours between August 21 and 23, coinciding with an unusually close pass between Mars and Earth in their orbits around the Sun.

The test spacecraft, with a mass of about 200 pounds (90 kg) performed well, Fiaschetti said. It demonstrated the capability to raise and lower its orbit, and remains power positive to date, periodically checking in with Inversion flight controllers. However, the spacecraft will not make a controlled landing. "Ray won't be coming back," Fiaschetti said. "We're doing long-term testing of software on orbit."

The award does not directly imply a delivery agreement; first, NASA will verify whether Blue Origin is capable of successfully sending the expensive VIPER rover to the moon's south pole. To be eligible to take on the VIPER delivery, the company must place its Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander-complete with a NASA technology payload-on the lunar surface by the end of 2025.

The Space Shuttle was never designed to be dismantled. In addition to its frame and internals, the vehicle is covered with delicate ceramic tiles, capable of withstanding the heat of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, along with thermal blankets. Then there are the cables and connectors underneath. If it must be moved and legal hurdles such as ownership are overcome, then dismantling it and accepting damage to an irreplaceable artifact is unavoidable.

When you view anything at all in the Universe, you're not seeing it precisely as it is right now: at the moment you experience seeing it. The speed of light, even though it's the fastest speed that any signal can travel throughout the Universe, is still finite. No matter how close or distant an object is, you're only seeing it as it was a particular amount of time ago: at the moment the now-arriving light was emitted from the object you're observing.

A futuristic £14.5million plane with TV screens instead of windows has been unveiled. The jet, called Phantom 3500, will use technology on the outside of the plane to provide immersive views. The creators, Otto Aerospace, plan to launch the aircraft in 2027. It also features an ultra-smooth exterior, which enhances the laminar flow of the plane - significantly reducing drag and increasing fuel efficiency and performance.

I vividly remember the first experiment I conducted for my PhD in economics, investigating the conditions under which trust forms between strangers. I had built a solid theoretical framework, designed the experiment - in which students played a trust game - carefully, and optimistically named my database 'AwesomeData'. But when I ran my first sessions, the results made no sense. My participants weren't behaving as theory - or even common sense - would suggest, because my set-up made the task too confusing.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

This early stage research could one day also be used to treat infertility for women of advanced maternal age "or those who are unable to produce viable eggs due to previous treatment of cancer or other causes," according to an OHSU post. Yes, but: The Portland-based team noted several limitations in their proof-of-concept study, published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, notably that all of the embryos had chromosomal abnormalities.

Imagine he's looking at the spectrum of light. He puts his thermometer at the very end of the longest wavelengths, what's going to be your red, your hot wavelengths, and he realizes that his temperature of his thermometer continues to increase in temperature. What does this tell us? This tells us that there's something beyond what we can physically see. There's something beyond that red wavelength that we can see.

The late English writer Douglas Adams is best known as the author of the 1979 book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But there is much more to Adams than what is written in his Wikipedia entry. Whether or not you need to know that his birth sign is Pisces or that libraries worldwide store his books under the same string of numbers - 13230702 - you can if you head to an overlooked corner of the Wikimedia Foundation called Wikidata.

NASA didn't begin in a vacuum, but rather as a response to a unique event in human history: the 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite in all of Earth's history, completing an orbit around the Earth at an altitude of hundreds of miles (or kilometers) above the ground every 90 minutes.

Microsoft has announced progress on a new chip cooling approach that could help address one of the biggest bottlenecks in scaling AI infrastructure: heat. The company's researchers have successfully demonstrated in-chip microfluidic cooling, a system that channels liquid coolant directly into etched grooves on the back of silicon chips. Traditional cooling methods in data centers, such as cold plates, dissipate heat by transferring it through multiple material layers.

In mice, a small group of neurons responds specifically to sweet tastes. They project into a hidden appetite hub, a part of the brain that links motivation and emotion to behavior. When these neurons fire, sugar becomes not just pleasant but irresistible. Switch them off, and even sugar loses its pull. This is the first clear evidence of how taste signals acquire the motivational force that drives consumption.

Nucleic acid circuits using polymerases can maintain dynamic steady states by consuming nucleoside or deoxynucleoside triphosphates7,8, demonstrating diverse functions, such as multistate memories9 and nonlinear classification10. However, with a few exceptions11, they continuously consume energy even without input changes, leading to energy waste and limited operation times12. Enzyme-free nucleic acid circuits use only rationally designed components, making them more robust to environmental changes, such as temperature and salt conditions13, while performing complex information processing tasks, including Boolean logic14,15 and neural computation16,17.

Circumstances might push the launch back a little, but following a successful static fire in late August, confidence in the rocket is high. That flight followed four consecutive failures (three in flight and one where SpaceX didn't bother to launch anything at all and exploded the vehicle on the ground instead). October's flight will be the final one of the version 2 variant of Starship ahead of version 3, which is due to debut in 2026.

If you're an adult who loves STEM, or a parent wanting to spark a child's interest in any of these fields, the new LEGO® Ideas collectible display is for you. Called The Evolution of STEM, it showcases some of the most historic innovations in science through mini-builds displayed on an open book buildable base. As you create these builds and display them later, you'll be reminded of important milestones in scientific and human history.

The problem of how migrating birds and homing pigeons navigate still remains unsolved in spite of intensive research efforts in the past few years. Over twenty years ago, Gustav Kramer suggested that in order to fly from an unfamiliar place to a geographically distant home site, a bird would need information analogous to a map (on which to read its own position and that of home), and a compass (to choose the appropriate direction indicated by the map). It is now well established that both migrating song birds and homing pigeons (on which much of the experimental work is done) have up to three types of compass-based on the Sun's azimuth, star patterns and the resultant of the Earth's magnetic field , but the nature of the map remains elusive ... [T]he big remaining mystery surrounding the magnetic compass, is how the bird's sensory system detects the Earth's magnetic field.

US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people's skin cells and then fertilising it with sperm. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life. It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child.

Along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was born in a rapid cosmic expansion some 14 billion years ago. The Florida native earned a PhD in particle physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970.