When Apollo 17 astronauts returned from the moon in 1972, they visited NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, to thank staff for their contributions to the mission, saying “we stood on the shoulders of giants as we shot for the stars.”
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SpaceX launched 26 missions from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A in 2025, including four human spaceflight missions. That era is coming to an end. A massive crane was put in place this week with speculation it will soon remove the crew access arm from the historic launch site that hosted most of the Apollo and space shuttle missions as SpaceX shifts plans for all future launches of its Crew Dragon spacecraft to its neighboring pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
An international collaboration of astrophysicists that includes researchers from Yale has created and tested a detection system that uses gravitational waves to map out the locations of merging black holes—known as supermassive black hole binaries—around the universe. Such a map would provide a vital new way to explore and understand astronomy and physics, just as X-rays and radio waves did in earlier eras, the researchers say. The new protocol demonstrated by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) offers a detection protocol to populate the map.
Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the churn of its liquid nickel-iron outer core, but it is not a constant feature. Every so often, the magnetic north and south poles swap places in what are called geomagnetic reversals, and the record of these flips is preserved in rocks and sediments, including those from the ocean floor. These reversals don’t happen suddenly, but over several thousand years, where the magnetic field fades and wobbles while the two poles wander and finally settle in the opposite positions of the globe.
A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited, with the potential to be a spectacular sight in early April. C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was spotted by a team of four amateur astronomers with a remotely operated telescope in the Atacama desert on January 13.
Today’s most powerful computers hit a wall when tackling certain problems, from designing new drugs to cracking encryption codes. Error-free quantum computers promise to overcome those challenges, but building them requires materials with exotic properties of topological superconductors that are incredibly difficult to produce. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and West Virginia University have found a way to tune these materials into existence by simply tweaking a chemical recipe, resulting in a change in many-electron interactions.
Measuring conditions in volatile clouds of superheated gases known as plasmas is central to pursuing greater scientific understanding of how stars, nuclear detonations and fusion energy work. For decades, scientists have relied on a technique called Thomson scattering, which uses a single laser beam to scatter from plasma waves as a way to measure critical information such as plasma temperature, density and flow.
The Pauli exclusion principle is a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics and is essential for the structure and stability of matter. Now an international collaboration of physicists has carried out one of the most stringent experimental tests to date of this foundational rule of quantum physics and has found no evidence of its violation. Using the VIP-2 experiment, the team has set the strongest limits so far for possible violations involving electrons in atomic systems, significantly constraining a range of speculative theories beyond the Standard Model, including those that suggest electrons have internal structure, and so-called “Quon models.” Their experiment was reported in Scientific Reports in November 2025.
A research team from the Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (XIOPM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from the Institute National de la Recherche Scientifique, Canada, and Northwest University, has developed a single-shot compressed upconversion photoluminescence lifetime imaging (sCUPLI) system for high-speed imaging.
Recently, a research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences successfully grew a high-entropy garnet-structured oxide crystal and achieved enhanced laser performance at the 2.8 μm wavelength band. By introducing a high-entropy design into a garnet crystal system, the team obtained a wide emission band near 2.8 μm and continuous-wave laser output with improved average power and beam quality, demonstrating the material’s strong potential as a high-performance gain medium for mid-infrared ultrashort-pulse lasers.
Quantum computers hold great promise for exciting applications in the future, but for now they keep presenting physicists and engineers with a series of challenges and conundrums. One of them relates to decoherence and the errors that result from it: bit flips and phase flips. Such errors mean that the logical unit of a quantum computer, the qubit, can suddenly and unpredictably change its state from “0” to “1,” or that the relative phase of a superposition state can jump from positive to negative.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger ordered the Virginia State Police to end its 287(g) agreement, which deputized officers to work for the federal government
The man fired at least one shot, striking an officer in the chest, where he was protected from more severe injuries by his ballistic vest
A Ranger helicopter crew was responding to assist the Flagstaff PD and other law enforcement agencies when it crashed, killing the pilot and the trooper/paramedic inside
YouTube Video Here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/xX2iv4SyNHg?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1 Of all the possible ways the Neanderthals may have gone extinct, it turns out that it may have been as simple as a common childhood affliction that ultimately spelled their doom. Illness is part of being human, no matter how much we don’t like it. It helps build up our immune systems and makes us grateful when we are healthy. Unfortunately, there are some illnesses that some humans can’t overcome, but we have survived as a species because most of us at least overcome the common stuff. Neanderthals, however, were not so fortunate. An ear infection is a common childhood malady that is perfectly treatable today, either through antibiotics or surgery. But 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals did not have the benefit of modern medicine and health care professionals, nor did they have the anatomical features of modern human adults that make ear infections more unlikely to develop.  In a new study published by the American Association for Anatomy, a team of researchers found that the structure of Neanderthal ears made them more susceptible to ear infections as adults. According to the study:
“It may sound far-fetched, but when we, for the first time, reconstructed the Eustachian tubes of Neanderthals, we discovered that they are remarkably similar to those of human infants,” Downstate Health Sciences University Associate Professor Samuel Márquez, Ph.D. said in a statement. “Middle ear infections are nearly ubiquitous among infants because the flat angle of an infant’s Eustachian tubes is prone to retain the otitis media bacteria that cause these infections – the same flat angle we found in Neanderthals.”  While the Eustachian tubes of Neanderthals remained flat and shortened into adulthood, human Eustachian tubes lengthen and the angle changes as infants grow up, reducing the chances of developing ear infections because ears are able to drain better. Because Neanderthals did not develop the kind of ear drainage humans benefit from, they were more at risk of developing other common afflictions, thus compromising their immune systems. As a result, they were a more sickly species than us, which hurt their ability to compete with us for resources in a world where survival was already difficult and uncertain. According to the study: “In living humans, mechanical CET dysfunction underlies OM in infants and young children, with sequelae including hearing loss, meningitis, and pneumonia. Despite proven linkage of CET malfunction with OM, the role of CET morphology in Neanderthal health and disease remains unstudied. We reconstructed Neanderthal CET morphology, comparing their crania to a modern human growth series. Methods included geometric morphometrics and univariate measures among Procrustes‐fitted coordinates. Results showed Neanderthal adults exhibiting primitively tall and narrow nasopharynges with infant‐like horizontal CET and choanal orientation. As horizontal CET orientation is associated with increased OM incidence in infants and children until around age six, its appearance in Neanderthal adults strongly indicates persistence of high OM susceptibility at this time. This could have compromised fitness and disease load relative to sympatric modern humans, affecting Neanderthals’ ability to compete within their ecological niche, and potentially contributing to their rapid extinction.”
Indeed, Neanderthals died out 40,000 years ago despite being able to make fire, hunt, manufacture jewelry and develop a unique culture of their own. The team was able to discover this new anatomical information about Neanderthals by reconstructing their ears based on ear canal remains.
Not only does this new information help us understand Neanderthals and why they disappeared, but it also teaches us not to neglect even the simplest explanations to solve mysteries.
Interestingly enough, ear canal remains also helped a separate team of researchers discover that Neanderthals easily developed a condition known today as swimmer’s ear. Neanderthals lived near the coastline, thus they utilized the ocean for food resources, which means they often dove under the water to gather seafood such as clams and shellfish. And because of this, they developed swimmer’s ear, which they would have been especially susceptible to developing because of their flat Eustachian tubes that had not lengthened by adulthood like our own.  Clearly, modern humans had an advantage over the Neanderthals within our own ears that enabled us to grow out of developing childhood ear infections that could have resulted in other more major afflictions. Neanderthals were not as lucky, so they were less healthy. Of course, they likely solved this ultimately by interbreeding with Homo sapiens, which is why Neanderthal DNA is still found in the human genome today. Had Neanderthals not mated with humans, they would have died out completely because of a childhood ear infection and other illnesses. Interbreeding also hastened their disappearance but helped them overcome these ear infections and avoid total extinction on a genetic level. Related: Researchers says UV radiation caused by a polar shift may have taken out the Neanderthals More about Neanderthals and how their DNA is with us today from SciShow Featured Image: Comparison of faces of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal, Daniela Hitzemann (left photograph), Stefan Scheer (right photograph) / unknown (reconstructions) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) |
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