ScIence

Have you noticed that Orion the Hunter – one of the most iconic and familiar of the wintertime constellations – is looking a little… different as of late? The culprit is its upper shoulder star Alpha Orionis, aka Betelgeuse, which is looking markedly faint, the faintest it has been for the 21st century. When will this nearby supernova candidate pop, and what would it look like if it did?

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock - after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Austra

As far as hypothetical space megastructures go, the stellar engine is one of our favourites – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood. Now, new research has put forward another idea for what such a radical stellar engine might look like. Via this beautiful video from Kurzgesag

Climate change, global warming, El Niño, or whatever else people have heard it called in the last two decades has been a massively divisive discussion. Some believe that the entire thing was simply a hoax made up by China in order to somehow make U.S. manufacturing less competitive. Meanwhile, almost the entire scientific community of the world has shown time and time again that climate change

The oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice – dubbed the last Arctic ice refuge – is now thought to be disappearing twice as fast as ice in the rest of the Arctic Ocean. A new time-lapse video (below), created by the American Geophysical Union, shows the age of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland since 1984, shortly after reliable satellite observations began. As you can clearl

NASA recently detected a massive thermonuclear explosion coming from outer space. The culprit seems to be a distant pulsar, the space agency reports, which is the stellar remains of a star that blew up in a supernova but was too small to form a black hole. NASA spotted the burst because it sent out an intense beam of x-rays that got picked up by the agency's orbital observatory NICER. All in

Electron microscopes are great at producing high-resolution images of a material's atomic structure - if the material is hard, that is. Unfortunately, the devices' electron beams can destroy softer materials, so scientists typically rely on X-rays, which can't reach atomic resolution, to image those. But scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have publ