Category: Science

Nerf has made plenty of fully-automatic blasters over the years, but their toys typically lack punch, precision, and fire rate. (3DprintedLife) set about building a blaster to rectify that last shortcoming, aiming for design that could fire 100 darts per second. The design uses half length darts which tend to fly a little nicer from...

The Bennu space rock passes near Earth every six years and has had three close encounters with the planet in 1999, 2005, and 2011, NASA says. A NASA mission is due to land in the US with “pristine” samples from an asteroid which scientists warned could one day hit Earth. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft gathered rocks...

A photo of the Vikram lander taken by Pragyaan rover Last month, India made history when it became the first country to land a lunar mission near the Moon’s south pole. Chandrayaan-3’s lander and rover – called Vikram and Pragyaan – spent about 10 days in the region, gathering data and images to be sent...

A global team of scientists has delved deeper into understanding the complex nature of dark matter, which comprises a staggering 84% of the universe’s matter content. Their focus has been on the ‘dark photon’, a theoretical particle that might bridge the gap between the elusive dark sector and regular matter. New insights into dark matter...

Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter A parasite that notoriously turns ants into “zombies” by infecting and taking control of their brains is “even more cunning” than previously thought, according to scientists. The lancet...

For the past couple of planning sols, Perseverance has been working on a complex navigation out of a boulder field on one of the lobes on top of the fan. The engineering team planned specific maneuvers and utilized Perseverance’s autonomous navigation capabilities to navigate around and eventually out of the boulder field. This drive took Perseverance to...

Biophysicist Irina Iachina, University of Southern Denmark, holds a silk fiber, produced by a golden orb-web spider. Credit: Anders Boe/University of Southern Denmark Numerous scientists aspire to unlock the remarkable capability of spiders to spin silk threads that are immensely strong, lightweight, and flexible. In fact, pound for pound, spider silk is stronger than steel...

Earth is exceeding its “safe operating space for humanity” in six of nine key measurements of its health, and two of the remaining three are heading in the wrong direction, a new study has said. The planet’s climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and “novel” chemicals (human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste) are all...

We don’t want to alarm anyone, but the sun is broken. A section of the sun has left the surface and begun circulating around the top of the star as if it were a huge polar vortex, and it’s not exactly clear why it’s happened. The observation was made possible thanks to the James Webb...

The latest experimental procedure is part of a growing field of research aimed at advancing cross-species transplants, testing the technique on bodies that have been donated for science. AFP US surgeons have completed the longest successful pig-to-human kidney transplant, pushing the boundaries of cross-species organ transplantation. The experimental procedure, led by Robert Montgomery, director of...