Technology
Forty years on, Chernobyl’s fuel particles have barely changed — and that is the finding
Researchers in Hanover and Dresden report that fuel fragments scattered by the 1986 explosion have not broken down as expected, making them…
Tagged “research”
Technology
Four astronauts reached the ISS three weeks late. They will study what weightlessness does to blood clotting
A Falcon 9 carried the crew from Cape Canaveral after a fuel system fault delayed the mission. The six-month research programme is named…
Technology
OpenAI has fired three researchers over mishandled information. At least two worked on safety
The company says the three handled sensitive information outside established procedures, including work involving an external organisation…
Technology
Cambridge researchers made hydrogen fuel out of plastic waste, using solar panels that do not generate electricity
PET is broken down into ethylene glycol, then fed to a panel coated in a photocatalyst. Instead of making electricity, the panel absorbs…
Technology
A quantum computer ran in orbit for the first time — shielded in aluminium, working 30 minutes a day in Earth’s shadow
A photonic processor on a glass chip was launched to 510km in June last year. Sunlight and radiation overwhelmed its detectors, so the team…
Technology
A 16-year-old remembers a day from when he was three months old. Researchers have now confirmed why
Only about 0.1% of people have highly superior autobiographical memory. A new study in Cortex documents a teenager with verified…
Technology
A fossil dug up in Japan 30 years ago turns out to be a new armoured dinosaur that walked from America
CT scans of a skull found in Hokkaido in 1995 identified Nipponopelta ezoensis, a nodosaurid between 93 and 100 million years old — and…
Technology
Bacteria survived a laboratory copy of Enceladus — the ocean under Saturn’s moon may be habitable
Researchers in Berlin rebuilt the conditions of the ocean beneath Enceladus in a lab and put deep-sea vent bacteria into it. They lived on…
Technology
Bangladesh’s dairy carbon footprint is 27% lower than anyone had assumed, and the reason is not what you would guess
A five-year study at Bangladesh Agricultural University, published with the University of Connecticut, found the real figure is 27% below…
World
A jet with an anteater’s nose and a cockpit so far back the pilot flies by camera
The X-59 is designed to flatten the sonic boom that kept Concorde off routes across the US. It is the latest in a line of experimental NASA…
Health
The Kent meningitis bacterium borrowed genes from harmless neighbours — and that is what made it deadly
UKHSA and Oxford sequenced the bacterium behind Britain’s worst MenB outbreak. It had picked up genetic material from bugs that normally…
Technology
A quantum computer just proved two geometry theorems. Why that is bigger than it sounds, and what it is not
Researchers at Zhejiang and Tsinghua ran Wu's 1978 theorem-proving method on a 121-qubit processor and got two correct proofs, the first…