A new look at decades-old data from the Apollo missions has uncovered evidence of tens of thousands of previously unrecognized moonquakes. The results could reveal details about the moon’s inner workings and could have implications for future human missions. “There were more tectonic events on the moon, it’s more tectonically active than considered before,” says … Read more
For millennia, humans have seen inexplicable things in the sky. Some have been beautiful, some have been terrifying, and some — like auroras and solar eclipses before they were understood scientifically — have been both. Today’s aircraft, balloons, drones, satellites and more only increase the chances of spotting something confounding overhead. In the United States, … Read more
To leave a lasting trail, meteors need to aim low. A new survey of shooting stars shows that meteors that blaze through 90 kilometers up in the sky leave a persistent afterglow, unlike those that burn up at greater heights. Meteors are normally blink-and-you’ll-miss-it events. A particle of space dust leaves a fiery trail of … Read more
In 2023, a new type of apple made its commercial debut at a trade show in Berlin. The Tutti is crisp, juicy and has that perfect blush tinge — a lovely cultivar that took decades to produce. But it has a bigger claim to fame: It is designed to thrive at temperatures as high as … Read more
Imagine going on a weeklong business trip and not coming home until the following year. That may be the situation for U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose eight-day mission to the International Space Station has already stretched to more than two months and is likely to go even longer. The pair launched to … Read more
For billions of years, the continents have cruised across Earth’s surface like tectonic vessels, but they have not survived unscathed. Waves in the underlying layer known as the mantle can scour off the keels of continents, buoying their surfaces upward to form prominent landforms far from any active plate boundaries, researchers propose in the Aug. … Read more
In some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 10 percent of children die before they turn 5 years old (SN: 8/3/22); in 2022 alone, around 2.8 million young children died in the entire region. Most are dying from pneumonia, diarrhea or malaria — diseases that can be treated with antibiotics. But prescribing antibiotics to all children … Read more
It’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere — but you wouldn’t know it from the thermostat. On August 26, a remote stretch of the coastline in Western Australia experienced the highest winter temperature ever recorded anywhere in the country: a blistering 41.6° Celsius (107° Fahrenheit). In Bidyadanga, an Aboriginal community in Western Australia, the overnight low … Read more
Contrary to a previous report, there’s no evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way’s most massive and luminous globular star cluster, a new study finds. Instead, a hive of much smaller black holes diving into and out of the tightly packed star cluster’s center can explain the movement and distribution … Read more
One of the most compelling potential signs of extraterrestrial communication might have an astrophysical explanation. Called the “Wow!” signal, the bright burst of radio waves has defied our understanding since its discovery in the 1970s. Now, scientists using archived data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suggest a new possible source for the signal: … Read more