SpaceX and Elon Musk are once again being called on to rescue spacefarers - this time, the Chinese crew of Shenzhou-20, delayed on China's Tiangong space station after suspected space debris damage. The three-person crew including Chen Dong, Chen Zhongui, and Wang Jie, arrived in April and were supposed to return in November after a handover with the Shenzhou-21 crew. That return has been postponed while engineers assess potential damage from what reports describe as "a tiny piece of space debris."
The researchers used cosmological simulations to recreate the first 700 million years of cosmic history, focusing on the formation of a single dwarf galaxy. In their virtual galaxy, waves of stars were born in short, explosive bursts as cold gas clouds collapsed inside a dark matter halo. Instead of a single starburst episode followed by a steady drizzle of star formation as Garcia expected, there were two major rounds of stellar birth. Whole swarms of stars flared to life like Christmas tree lights.
The same is often true for entrepreneurs. A Journal of Business Venturing study found that the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, even in tech. In fact, a 60-year-old startup founder was three times more likely to launch a successful startup than a 30-year-old startup founder, and nearly twice as likely to launch a startup that landed in the top 0.1% of all companies in terms of revenue and profits.
In math, a knot is a tangled piece of string with its ends glued together. Two knots are the same if you can twist and stretch one into the other without cutting the string. But it's hard to tell if this is possible based solely on what the knots look like. A knot that seems really complicated and tangled, for instance, might actually be equivalent to a simple loop.
By observing the brightness of distant dying stars, astronomers have long come to believe that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. In fact, that apparent reality is deeply built into cosmological models: a mysterious force that influences the universe on the largest scales, dubbed dark energy, is believed to explain the acceleration. However, not everybody agrees with this widely accepted scientific consensus.
Toyota's next-generation electric vehicle batteries could vastly improve the driving range and charging speeds compared to today's packs. The company is reportedly working on cells that can last four decades and be reused multiple times during that period. The aging will happen with minimal energy degradation, the company claims. Writing about solid-state batteries feels like waiting for a train that's always five minutes away, but it never actually arrives.
The UK Government has announced more than £14 million in new funding to accelerate the commercial use of quantum technology across healthcare, defence, transport and energy, in a move it says will help power Britain's next industrial revolution. The investment, unveiled on Friday at the National Quantum Technologies Showcase in London, marks a major milestone in the country's National Quantum Technologies Programme - part of its wider plan to translate cutting-edge science into real-world applications that drive economic growth.
Until now, preclinical trials relied primarily on two-dimensional cell cultures and animal models, which often failed to accurately replicate human biology. Since 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not required animal testing, thanks in part to organoids, which Hans Clevers (Eindhoven, 68 years old), professor of molecular genetics at Utrecht University, has been researching since the beginning of the century.
Tested by the valley's extreme summertime heat, the flowering shrub Arizona honeysweet (Tidestromia oblongifolia) thrives. The humble-looking, seafoam green plant considers 113°F optimal for photosynthesis - the highest known temperature tolerance of any major crop species, according to new research. A team of scientists published the find on Friday in the journal Current Biology, revealing the plant's tricks for growing fast in heat and drawing lessons for how to engineer crops to withstand climate change.
As cities sprawl ever outwards, they bring their big lights with them, and the once-dark night skies overhead are being lost. But in New Zealand, thanks to its low population density, the skies have remained surprisingly dark, and over 96 percent of its landmass still has views of the Milky Way at night. DarkSky International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the night sky, has identified some of the best spots for witnessing the wonders of the cosmos across the island country.
