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Latest story• Jun 8, 2025

This “robot bird” flies at 45 mph through forests—With no GPS or light

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have developed SUPER, a drone capable of navigating complex environments at high speeds with bird-like agility. Flying at over 20 meters per second, it can avoid obstacles as thin as 2.5 millimeters using onboard sensors and computing. SUPER's advanced LIDAR sensor and planning framework enable split-second decisions, making it suitable for search and rescue, autonomous...

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Science Was Broken — And Bayesian Reasoning Saved It

Science education often focuses on memorizing facts and formulas, but this approach misses the essence of scientific inquiry. True science is a dynamic process of observation, questioning, and hypothesis testing. Scientists...

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432 robots move 7,500-ton building in Chinese city to make way for new construction

Shanghai's 100-year-old Huayanli complex is being temporarily relocated using 432 small robots to make way for underground construction. The 7,382-ton building is moving 10 meters daily to allow for new cultural and commercial...

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Scientists set new fusion record—fueling hopes for limitless clean energy

German researchers achieved a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, sustaining a reaction for 43 seconds using the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator. The plasma was heated to over 30 million degrees Celsius, setting a new record for the...

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UK firm achieves tritium breakthrough, could boost nuclear fusion fuel supply

Astral Systems, a UK fusion company, has successfully bred tritium, a crucial fusion fuel, in its own reactor during a 55-hour campaign. This breakthrough addresses a major challenge in fusion energy development. The company's...

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Golden ratio base numbers

The golden ratio φ forms the basis of the "phinary" number system, expressing positive integers as sums of φ powers with 0 and 1 coefficients. Analogous to binary, it uses negative φ powers for some integers. Phinary...

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Lighting up earthquakes: How scientists watched ruptures evolve in milliseconds

A lab earthquake model links microscopic fault contact to quake occurrences, revealing stress buildup and rupture processes, which could lead to new methods for early earthquake monitoring and prediction.

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Build A Quantum Circuit Using Single-Qubit Quantum Gates With Qiskit

Qiskit enables the construction of quantum circuits using single-qubit gates, allowing users to create and manipulate quantum states through practical programming exercises based on previously learned concepts.

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Milky Way-Andromeda crash? There’s now only 50 percent chance of this epic event

New research suggests the long-predicted collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies may not be inevitable. A study incorporating more comprehensive data and uncertainties shows a 50% chance the galaxies won't merge in...

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Photons Collide in the Void: Quantum Simulation Creates Light Out of Nothing

Oxford and Lisbon researchers have created the first real-time 3D simulations of intense laser beams altering the quantum vacuum. These simulations recreate "vacuum four-wave mixing," where three laser pulses generate a fourth...

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Monster black hole M87 is spinning at 80% of the cosmic speed limit — and pulling in matter even faster

Scientists have made groundbreaking discoveries about the supermassive black hole at M87's center. The black hole, 6.5 billion solar masses, spins at 80% of its theoretical maximum speed. Its accretion disk's inner edge moves at...

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How fast is quantum tunneling? A new clock reveals electrons don’t wait

Scientists developed a new method to measure quantum tunneling, a process where particles pass through seemingly impenetrable barriers. Using a phase-resolved attoclock, researchers found electrons don't experience delay during...

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Fluoro wall finally shattered: Quantum tunneling observed in heavy fluorine atoms

Quantum tunneling, previously observed only in lightweight atoms, has been detected in fluorine trapped in frozen neon, challenging assumptions about heavy atom tunneling and potentially impacting various fields like drug...

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Largest-ever map of the universe reveals 10x more early galaxies than expected

The COSMOS-Web project has released the largest universe map, created using James Webb Space Telescope data. It includes nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning 98% of cosmic time, reaching back 13.5 billion years. Surprising findings...

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Inside the Secret Meeting Where Mathematicians Struggled to Outsmart AI

A secret gathering of top mathematicians in Berkeley tested an AI chatbot, o4-mini, on complex math problems. The bot surprised researchers by solving graduate and research-level questions, often quicker than human experts. It...

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The sun: Facts about the bright star at the center of the solar system

The sun, our solar system's central star, is a massive ball of gas and plasma mainly composed of hydrogen and helium. At 865,000 miles across and 93 million miles from Earth, it powers life through nuclear fusion. Containing over...

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Startup puts a logical qubit in a single piece of hardware

Nord Quantique has developed an improved quantum computing system with enhanced error detection capabilities. The new hardware uses a resonator cavity with two posts and frequencies, creating a logical qubit that can identify...

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Scientists introduce scalable method to efficiently squeeze hydrogen from seawater

Researchers developed a corrosion-resistant electrode to efficiently extract hydrogen from seawater without desalination, achieving industrial-level production rates and potentially enabling large-scale green hydrogen generation...

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First Map Made of a Solid’s Secret Quantum Geometry

Physicists are developing new methods to explore the wave functions of entire materials, revealing hidden "quantum geometries" that dictate particle behavior. Recent breakthroughs allow researchers to measure these landscapes,...

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10 weird and wonderful things to look at under a microscope

Peering through a microscope opens up a world of hidden wonders. From the intricate patterns on a simple coin to the bustling ecosystem inside a moss cushion, everyday objects become extraordinary under magnification. "There...

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Common clay could be cheapest-ever way to capture CO₂, say US scientists

Scientists at Purdue University and Sandia National Laboratories discovered that clay minerals, particularly saponite, can effectively capture carbon dioxide from the air. This breakthrough could lead to low-cost, large-scale CO₂...

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Mathematicians Solve Multidimensional Shape-Slicing Dilemma

Mathematicians Klartag and Lehec solved the Bourgain slicing problem, proving that all convex shapes in n dimensions have a cross section above a fixed value, using heat diffusion models to reveal high-dimensional geometric...

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Gene-hacked microbe pulls rare earths and traps carbon 58x faster than nature

Cornell scientists engineered a microbe that extracts rare earth elements more efficiently and captures carbon faster than traditional methods, potentially revolutionizing mining and climate change mitigation through a startup...

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Quantum tech unlocks particle secrets that powerful supercomputers can’t solve

Quantum computers are advancing our understanding of fundamental forces. Researchers from TUM, Princeton, and Google Quantum AI used Google's quantum computer to simulate complex gauge theories describing particle interactions....

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