Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally “swim” through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators.

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Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered 15 new millisecond pulsars in 47 Tucanae—one of the closest and best studied globular clusters. The finding is reported in the latest issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Asteroid mining seems simple in theory. A spacecraft flies up to a giant rock in space, scoops out some material, and either processes it on site or returns it back to a huge central processing facility. But in practice, it is certainly not that simple, and a new paper from some Spanish researchers, published in […]

A joint European-Chinese spacecraft blasted off into orbit Tuesday to investigate what happens when extreme winds and giant explosions of plasma shot out from the sun slam into Earth’s magnetic shield.

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In December 2023, scientists looking at Mars data stumbled across something completely unexpected—observations of an atmospheric effect never before seen in the Red Planet’s atmosphere. Using instruments aboard NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission, scientists identified a phenomenon known to occur in Earth’s magnetosphere, where charged particles are squeezed like toothpaste coming out […]

Bizarre Venus surface formations (or coronae) are likely key to understanding our twin planet’s heretofore inscrutable interior. Using NASA Magellan spacecraft data from decades past, Anna Gulcher, an Earth and planetary scientist at Germany’s University of Freiburg, has created innovative new 3D models of the largest coronae to better understand Venus’ puzzling geodynamics.

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Earth has a group of cosmic stalkers. Known as “co-orbitals,” these small bits of rock have a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth. Basically, they take the exact same amount of time to orbit the sun as we do. Astronomers have long believed these objects wandered in from the main asteroid belt between Mars and […]

They rank among the darkest and coldest places in the solar system: Hundreds of lunar craters, many of them at the moon’s south pole, never receive direct sunlight and lie in permanent shadow. That’s exactly why physicist Jun Ye and his colleagues suggest that these craters are the perfect place to build a critical component […]