As the rate of humanity’s data creation increases exponentially with the rise of AI, scientists have been interested in DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing data. It encodes genetic information and determines the blueprint of every living thing on earth. And DNA is at least…
A satellite orbits the planet Shutterstock / Andrei Armiagov Over the past couple years, undersea cables from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean have been severed in apparent acts of sabotage. Now a NATO-backed project has shown how to quickly re-establish the most critical communications using satellites. The first demonstration of the $2.5 million…
Climate change can increase the frequency and severity of droughts Zhang Yu/VCG via Getty Images Severe droughts that persist for years have grown hotter, drier and larger since the 1980s. These long-lasting droughts – some of which are extreme enough to be classified as “megadroughts” – can be especially devastating to agriculture and ecosystems. Rising…
Artist’s impression of Carinodens, a mosasaur whose remains scientists suspect might have been manipulated and then labelled as a new species Henry Sharpe Remnants of a bizarre “shark-toothed” aquatic predator that lived alongside dinosaurs were probably forged, according to new research. The contentious fossil of a jaw fragment was apparently collected by miners working at…
Will cutting back on alcohol impact our reader’s social life? Ian Dagnall/Alamy Following the excesses of the holidays, many of us have opted for a Dry January. One reader tells me she hopes to keep cutting back on her drinking after the month ends, but she is worried about socialising. Alcohol raised her confidence with…
New Glenn blasts off Blue Origin Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket has successfully launched and reached orbit, though engineers failed to safely land the first-stage rocket booster back on Earth as hoped. Even so, the company’s first launch to orbit is a sign that Jeff Bezos’s space company is capable of challenging the current…
Dingo gap in Gale crater NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS From H. G. Wells’s alien invaders in The War of the Worlds to The Martian‘s abandoned astronaut, we have long been inspired by the idea that life could reside on Mars – human or otherwise. Flybys, orbiters and landers, including NASA’s Perseverance rover and its aerial sidekick, Ingenuity, have…
Maarten Wouters/Getty Images The Shape of Things UnseenAdam Zeman (Bloomsbury Circus) Just imagine! No, seriously, just imagine: an apple, perhaps, or a cartful of apples, or even a kingdom in which monstrous apples are fought by oranges on horseback. Our imaginations are capable of this – and much more. They are responsible for films, novels…
Josie Ford Play your cards right Readers in the northern hemisphere are facing many more weeks of long, dark nights and cold weather, so what could be better than a fun card game? If you’re too cash-strapped for poker and have exhausted the comic potential of Cards Against Humanity (a state typically achieved after about…
A late Iron Age Durotrigan burial at Winterborne Kingston in Dorset, UK Bournemouth University Genetic analysis of people buried in a 2000-year-old cemetery in southern England has bolstered the idea that Celtic communities in Britain placed women centre-stage, showing that women remained in their ancestral homes while men moved in from other communities – a…