Nearly a quarter of Japanese people under age 39 are virgins, according to a new analysis by a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo. The findings, published in BMC Public Health, show that Japanese young adults are having less sex today than their counterparts were decades ago. Both men and women are having their first sexual encounters later in life, and many are entering their 30s as virgins. While Japan’s sexless generation may seem shocking, people in other wealth ...read more

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch was delayed again yesterday, this time due to high winds. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said back on April 5 that because this is the first launch of Falcon Heavy's Block 5, the latest and most powerful version of its boosters, they are being "extra cautious." Mission managers are now targeting this evening, again at 6:35 p.m. EDT, with an approximately two-hour launch window. You can watch the livestream here or on SpaceX's website. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/w ...read more

After a nearly seven-week adventure since its launch, the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft will attempt make history today and touch down on the surface of the moon at 10:25 p.m. Israel time (2:25 p.m. Central). It’s a monumental undertaking and if it succeeds, Beresheet and its creators will join the select ranks of those who have safely landed on the moon - thus far only the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union. NASA and its Deep Space Network are aiding the mission i ...read more

In anthropology, bones don't always tell the whole story. Ancient remains can be so rare that an entire species of hominids can be compressed into one single fragment of bone. Thousands of generations, millions of individuals, epic untold stories — and our only insight is a stray tooth, or a few curving shards of skull. That leaves us without a true view of who these people were, even when it comes to our most recent ancestors, like the Neanderthals or the Denisovans. But a new study ...read more

Space travel, you may have heard, is hard. Hard on the brain, to design ways to slip the surly bonds of Earth in the first place, but also hard on the body, which needs to withstand conditions it was never designed for. If NASA’s serious about sending humans back to the moon and on to Mars, we’ll need to get a much better grasp on how spaceflight affects the human body. And instead of simply flying more and more people to space to find out all the potential effects, scientists have t ...read more

The European Space Agency's ExoMars spacecraft failed to find any traces of methane on the Red Planet during its hunt from April to August of 2018. This goes directly against recent positive reports of methane by ESA's own Mars Express spacecraft and NASA's Curiosity rover, which both saw methane in 2013. ExoMars has a sensitive detector that can pick up just one-tenth the amount of methane that Mars Express witnessed. That leaves two options: either one set of observations ...read more

Editor's Note: This story has been updated from a previous version. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy will likely launch on its first commercial flight today. The rocket launch was postponed from early April due to unspecified concerns, and then postponed again just this week due to weather. But Wednesday has a clear forecast with an 80 percent probability of a launch, so odds are good the mission will proceed. The launch window opens at 6:35 p.m. EDT this evening and extends until 8:32 p.m. EDT on T ...read more

At the northern tip of the Philippine island of Luzon lays Callao Cave, an expansive, seven-chamber limestone warren. Researchers report today they have uncovered the bones of a now-extinct, previously unknown human species near the far end of the first chamber. The discovery adds to growing evidence that human evolution and dispersal out of Africa is much more complicated than scientists once thought and and reinforces the importance of Southeast Asia in the history of our species. The rese ...read more

A massive international collaboration of researchers has released the first-ever direct image of the hellish environment surrounding a supermassive black hole. As part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, the team used a global array of telescopes to probe the fiery disk of material swirling around the gargantuan black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. The results confirm that the hot gas swirling around a black hole is traveling at nearly the speed of light, creating a chaot ...read more

On Wednesday, astronomers revealed the first image ever taken of a black hole, bringing a dramatic conclusion to a decades-long effort. The iconic image offers humanity its first glimpse at the gas and debris that swirl around its event horizon, the point beyond which material disappears forever. A favorite object of science fiction has finally been made real on screen. Their target was a nearby galaxy dubbed M87 and its supermassive black hole, which packs the mass of six and half billio ...read more