Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! The red supergiant that marks Orion’s left shoulder may have a tiny, unseen companion. Two independent studies found evidence of a star about the same mass as the sun, orbiting Betelgeuse about once every 2,100 days. “It was very surprising,” says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in […]

The word “bionic” conjures sci-fi visions of humans enhanced to superhuman levels. It’s true that engineering advances such as better motors and batteries, together with modern computing, mean that the required mechanical and electronic systems are no longer a barrier to advanced prostheses. But the field has struggled to integrate these powerful machines with the […]

Wind ownership is up for grabs. As an unpaid intern at an energy company in England, Emilia Groupp spent two years creating wind maps for renewable energy development. Colleagues told Groupp to ignore wind blowing across British borders, saying things like, “Oh we don’t want French wind,” recalls Groupp, an anthropologist of energy at Stanford […]

Picture Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airships. Steam-powered robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in top hats and petticoats. That type of retrofuturistic mash-up is the fantasy realm of steampunk, a genre of literature, film and other creative media. Theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern sees her specialty, the field of quantum […]

As dust from the Sahara blows thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean, it becomes progressively more nutritious for marine microbes, a new study suggests. Chemical reactions in the atmosphere chew on iron minerals in the dust, making them more water soluble and creating a crucial nutrient source for the iron-starved seas, researchers report September […]

An unexpected discovery about what made a tiny worm refuse to grow up has now led to the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.  Victor Ambros, now at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester, and Gary Ruvkun, of Harvard Medical School, found that small snippets of RNA called microRNAs can help […]

It’s the rarest particle decay ever discovered. Scientists have clinched the case for a special type of decay of subatomic particles called kaons. Further study of the rare decay could reveal a potential flaw in the standard model, physicists’ stalwart theory of subatomic particles. The decay is known as a “golden channel” because its rate […]

Horse-riding Scythian herders and warriors, who inhabited Central Asia and Eastern Europe around 2,500 years ago, may have had cultural roots several thousand kilometers to the east in Siberia, a new study suggests (SN: 7/27/23). Remains of at least one person and 18 horses found atop a roughly 2,800-year-old tomb in southern Siberia may come […]

As artificial intelligence explodes in popularity, two of its pioneers have nabbed the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics. The prize goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm announced October 8. These computational tools, which […]