Astronomy

These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque

The two brightest planets in our sky will be less than 2 degrees apart on June 9th at sunset.

The post Close Encounter: Jupiter and Venus appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

This ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week captures all the glory of the star-forming region N159. It's in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and is dwarfed by its much larger neighbour, the Tarantula Nebula. But N159 is gorgeous, too, so captivating that it's been featured as a Picture of the Week several times.

Our planet's liquid iron outer core is slowly giving up its secrets to a trio of satellites launched by ESA in 2013. Called Swarm, the three probes have been studying Earth's magnetic field at the source. In the process, they've revealed startling changes in a molten layer region 2,200 kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean. In 2010, material in that area of Earth's outer core changed direction. Insteading of moving slowly westward, it's now headed east and picking up speed. Scientists are working to figure out why by using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm data and additional information from ESA's CryoSat mission and ground-based instruments.

How animals use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate is one of biology’s biggest unsolved mysteries. This study proposes a totally new source for the sixth sense

Open star clusters are prevalent stellar structures in the Milky Way. Astronomers think their could be 100,000 of them. But they're not all the same: some are binary clusters, and within those, there's a hierarchy based on how they form. Recent research explores the different types and how many of each type is in the Milky Way.

Wemby’s height gives him an advantage in blocking and rebounding, but how does the tallest player in the NBA keep hitting all those threes?

A near-miss incident and a deadly chemical accident in a single week have affected thousands and drawn scrutiny to federal rules around risk management at chemical plants

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft flies above NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, during testing focused on lower-speed and altitude flight conditions in support of NASA’s Quesst mission. NASA continues to include two-flight days in its envelope expansion as teams work to better understand how the aircraft responds throughout its operating range.

After an AI from OpenAI found a trick to solve an 80-year-old conjecture from Paul Erdős, mathematicians have borrowed the same technique to solve another important problem

After an AI from OpenAI found a trick to solve an 80-year-old conjecture from Paul Erdős, mathematicians have borrowed the same technique to solve another important problem

Biochemist Kamala Baghvat, later known as Kamala Sohonie, forced open the doors of India’s male-only laboratories and used her knowledge to help feed a nation

Some neuroscientists argue that the roots of experience lie deep inside the brain. If they’re right, the consciousness club will get a lot bigger

Weapons-grade plutonium can fuel nuclear reactors known as mixed oxide reactors, but none of these exist in the U.S.

AI start-ups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding are hiring mathematicians and building AI systems that they hope will not only solve mathematics, but also build more intelligent AI

AI start-ups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding are hiring mathematicians and building AI systems that they hope will not only solve mathematics, but also build more intelligent AI

The cost of CAR T-cell therapy means that the highly effective cancer treatment is unavailable in many parts of the world. But a new way of making these cells could dramatically drive down the cost

The cost of CAR T-cell therapy means that the highly effective cancer treatment is unavailable in many parts of the world. But a new way of making these cells could dramatically drive down the cost

Image: The Meteosat Third Generation-Imager2 satellite sets sail from France to French Guiana

Helen Phillips, winner of the Climate Fiction prize for her novel Hum, on if stories can make a difference, her anxieties and writing about the climate