/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Robert Zubrin quite literally wrote the book on why humanity should go to Mars—so why has the renowned aerospace engineer soured on Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur leading the charge? /news/2025-06-renowned-mars-expert-trump-musk.html Space Exploration Fri, 06 Jun 2025 03:57:11 EDT news668401025 A private lunar lander from Japan crashed while attempting a touchdown Friday, the latest casualty in the commercial rush to the moon. /news/2025-06-private-lunar-lander-japan-falls.html Space Exploration Thu, 05 Jun 2025 16:49:19 EDT news668360952 Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can "catch" yawns from an android imitating human facial expressions, according to new research from City St George's, University of London. /news/2025-06-chimpanzees-androids.html Plants & Animals Ecology Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:45:06 EDT news668346304 A private lunar lander from Japan is closing in on the moon, aiming for a touchdown in the unexplored far north with a mini rover. /news/2025-06-private-japanese-lunar-lander-touchdown.html Space Exploration Thu, 05 Jun 2025 04:42:56 EDT news668317366 NASA's RASSOR (Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot) undergoes testing to extract simulated regolith, or the loose, fragmental material on the moon's surface, inside of the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 27. Ben Burdess, mechanical engineer at NASA Kennedy, observes RASSOR's counterrotating drums digging up the lunar dust and creating a three-foot berm. /news/2025-06-nasa-kennedy-latest-robot.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:56:02 EDT news668253361 Mars has received considerable attention in the past few decades, thanks to the many robotic missions exploring it to learn more about its past. NASA and China plan to send astronauts/taikonauts there in the coming decades, and commercial space companies like SpaceX hope to send passengers there sooner. This presents several significant challenges, one of the greatest being the lengthy transit times involved. Using conventional propulsion and low-energy trajectories, it takes six to nine months for crewed spacecraft to reach Mars. /news/2025-06-missions-mars-starship-months.html Space Exploration Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:13:05 EDT news668185982 A technique developed by Politecnico di Milano researchers is enabling scientists to control specific bacterial functions using light-sensitive materials. The Engineering of Bacteria to See Light (EOS) project has pioneered a system that allows bacteria to sense light and convert light energy into electrical signals across their membranes without the need for any genetic modification. This method is being explored as a promising solution to the growing global challenge of antibiotic resistance. /news/2025-06-bacterial-robot-tackles-antibiotic-resistance.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Tue, 03 Jun 2025 14:03:56 EDT news668178230 In the United States, earthen levees are an integral part of flood control systems, protecting around 23 million Americans and crucial infrastructure. Recently, the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2025 Report Card for America's Infrastructure rated the nation's levees a D+, with an estimated $70 billion needed for maintenance to bring them into a state of good repair. /news/2025-06-levee-advanced-technology.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 03 Jun 2025 04:31:04 EDT news668143861 Picture a place at the center of a global seaweed revolution. I'll bet the small English seaside town of Paignton in south Devon is not what comes to mind. A decade ago, I moved from the edge of Dartmoor to the coast. It was about a simple change in work-life balance, but what followed was more surprising. /news/2025-06-seaweed-powerful-climate-solution.html Ecology Agriculture Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:15:00 EDT news668092496 Researchers from the University of Waterloo have achieved a feat previously thought to be impossible—getting a sphere to roll down a totally vertical surface without applying any external force. /news/2025-06-redefining-physics-ball-vertically.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Soft Matter Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:11:03 EDT news668092261 Northwestern University researchers have developed a new water- and oil-resistant material that could become a safe, viable replacement for harmful plastics and toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in food packaging. /news/2025-06-pfas-safe-graphene-oxide-solution.html Materials Science Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:10:08 EDT news668085003 Artificial intelligence (AI) is ubiquitous in this era. As a result, human-AI interactions are becoming more frequent and complex, and this trend is expected to accelerate soon. Therefore, scientists have made remarkable efforts to better understand human-AI relationships in terms of trust and companionship. However, these man-machine interactions can possibly also be understood in terms of attachment-related functions and experiences, which have traditionally been used to explain human interpersonal bonds. /news/2025-06-human-ai-relationships-scale-patterns.html Social Sciences Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:34:04 EDT news668082841 A team of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has outlined the decade-long development and testing of what was originally known as the Europa Lander prototype—a partially autonomous robot designed to find out if Jupiter's moon Europa harbors life beneath its icy surface. /news/2025-06-shelved-europa-lander-mission-concept.html Space Exploration Astrobiology Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:19:21 EDT news668078352 A newly published study in the Journal of Neurophysiology reveals how blow flies (Calliphora vicina)—despite their minimal body weight—reliably detect forces through specialized sensory organs in their legs. The research offers new insights into insect biomechanics and presents promising applications for the design of next-generation walking robots. /news/2025-05-biomechanics-reveals-tiny-insects.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Fri, 30 May 2025 14:09:03 EDT news667832941 Advancing new hazard detection and precision landing technologies to help future space missions successfully achieve safe and soft landings is a critical area of space research and development, particularly for future crewed missions. /news/2025-05-nasa-ways-terrain.html Space Exploration Fri, 30 May 2025 09:39:04 EDT news667816741 A study published in Nature Communications presents a way to create deployable structures that transform from compact folded states into expansive configurations with perfectly smooth surfaces. /news/2025-05-origami-unfold-seamless-surfaces-deployable.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 30 May 2025 06:50:01 EDT news667732062 Open water swimming can be strangely claustrophobic. Immerse your face in cloudy water and your view might dwindle to a few centimeters. Yet, harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) manage to negotiate the turbid coastal waters in which they reside with ease, detecting their surroundings through various senses, including their dexterous whiskers. /news/2025-05-gaming-reveal-cloudy.html Plants & Animals Ecology Thu, 29 May 2025 18:00:02 EDT news667728091 Lunar exploration is entering a new era. Long after the Apollo missions, a renewed international interest comes with ambitious plans for a long-term presence on the moon. NASA's Artemis program is leading efforts to return humans to the lunar surface, with Artemis III aiming to land astronauts near the moon's South Pole as early as 2026. /news/2025-05-space-power-satellites-moon-lunar.html Space Exploration Thu, 29 May 2025 10:16:59 EDT news667732616 We live in a time of growing anxiety and fear, where the disruptive forces of artificial intelligence (AI), automation, Big Data, virtual reality and augmented reality loom ominously over people's lives. /news/2025-05-anxious-ai-cope-uniquely-human.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Thu, 29 May 2025 10:13:05 EDT news667732382 Around the world, knives are a popular weapon of choice among criminals. In Australia, for example, they are the most common weapon used in homicides. And in countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada, knife crime has recently been on the rise. /news/2025-05-knife-crime-common-difficult-robots.html Political science Thu, 29 May 2025 10:08:05 EDT news667732082 China on Thursday launched a space probe on the country's first mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid and bring them home for research, the Xinhua state news agency reported. /news/2025-05-china-space-probe-asteroid-samples.html Space Exploration Wed, 28 May 2025 16:27:52 EDT news667668466 SpaceX's prototype Starship exploded over the Indian Ocean on Tuesday, capping another bumpy test flight for the rocket central to billionaire Elon Musk's dream of colonizing Mars. /news/2025-05-starship-megarocket-indian-ocean-latest.html Space Exploration Wed, 28 May 2025 04:41:54 EDT news667625477 Marine life plays a pivotal role in Earth's carbon cycle. Phytoplankton at the base of the aquatic food web take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, convert it to organic carbon, and move it around as they become food for other organisms. Much of this carbon eventually returns to the atmosphere, but some ends up sequestered in the deep ocean via a process called carbon export. /news/2025-05-robotic-quantify-carbon-southern-ocean.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 27 May 2025 13:00:07 EDT news667569120 Researchers have developed a machine learning model called DreaMS, which significantly accelerates the analysis of previously unknown molecules. The study is published in Nature Biotechnology. /news/2025-05-unknown-molecules-ai.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Tue, 27 May 2025 10:00:02 EDT news667557728 SpaceX is set Tuesday for the next test flight of its Starship megarocket—the linchpin of founder Elon Musk's Mars ambitions—after the vessel's last two outings ended in fiery explosions. /news/2025-05-spacex-starship-fiery-failures.html Space Exploration Tue, 27 May 2025 04:05:58 EDT news667537552 Kirigami is a traditional Japanese art form that entails cutting and folding paper to produce complex three-dimensional (3D) structures or objects. Over the past decades, this creative practice has also been applied in the context of physics, engineering, and materials science research to create new materials, devices and even robotic systems. /news/2025-05-intuitive-geometric-method-inverse-kirigami.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Sun, 25 May 2025 09:00:01 EDT news667223147 Andy Weir's bestselling story "The Martian" predicts that by 2035 NASA will have landed humans on Mars three times, perfected return-to-Earth flight systems and collaborated with the China National Space Administration. We are now 10 years past the Hollywood adaptation's 2015 release and 10 years shy of its fictional timeline. At this midpoint, Mars exploration looks a bit different than how it was portrayed in "The Martian," with both more discoveries and more controversy. /news/2025-05-decade-martian-planetary-scientist-real.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 22 May 2025 15:20:02 EDT news667138356 Throughout its nearly 100-year manufacturing history, the crack resistance of natural rubber—one of the world's most widely used biomaterials—hasn't improved much. Until now. Materials researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a way to produce natural rubber that retains its key properties of stretchiness and durability while greatly improving its ability to resist cracking, even after repeated cycles of use. /news/2025-05-rubber-material-ten-stronger-resistant.html Polymers Thu, 22 May 2025 13:11:41 EDT news667138295 Soft-bodied robots are unlocking a new era of adaptive machines that can safely interact with the human body, squeeze through tight spaces, and propel themselves autonomously. /news/2025-05-pneumatic-soft-robot-mimics-rotating.html Biotechnology Thu, 22 May 2025 09:51:05 EDT news667126258 How do insects perceive mechanical stress? This is a question of interest in many different fields, including comparative morphology, neurobiology and robotics. /news/2025-05-sensation-legs-flies-dont.html Plants & Animals Molecular & Computational biology Wed, 21 May 2025 15:32:29 EDT news667060345