Few natural sights are revered as much as the aurora borealis, and scientists at NASA are hoping that two new rocket missions will help illuminate the processes that lead to such a magnificent light display. The two missions, with launch windows that opened January 21, 2025, are aiming for the Alaskan night sky, where auroras shine regularly during the winter. Auroras are byproducts of the interaction between solar wind and the Earth’s magnetosphere, containing its magnetic field. Following a ...read more
How is music changing over time? On one scale, it’s easy to see how music evolved through the ages as baroque music was displaced by classical, romantic and then modern music. In the 20th century alone, jazz, country and western, rock’n’roll all emerged along with pop, rap, hip hop and so on. Much of this rapid rate of change was driven by new ways of composing, experiencing and sharing music via vinyl, cassettes, CDs and mp3s. The emergence of digital streaming platforms, social networks ...read more
Faraway from Earth in the Sunrise Arc galaxy lies a star so distant that it took 12.9 billion years for its light to reach our planet. Named Earendel, after a character from J.R.R Tolkien’s Silmarillion, this star is the most distant ever observed by scientists and is now a mind-boggling 28 billion light years from Earth.An Astonishing Star DiscoveryEarendel dates back to the first billion years after the big bang, offering researchers a glimpse of stars from this time in the Universe’s hist ...read more
Solitude is, simply enough, “the state or condition of being alone,” explains Thuy-vy Nguyen, a researcher at Durham University, U.K., who studies solitude. Time alone might be voluntary or involuntary; it might be pleasant or unpleasant. It all depends on the context. So, solitude is not necessarily bad, but is it beneficial? Nguyen is the principal investigator of Solitude Lab, where she and her team work to unravel these kinds of mysteries. They’ve found that solitude offers at least t ...read more
For adults of a certain age, dental implant advertisements appear ubiquitous. But the price — at potentially thousands of dollars per tooth — might, for many people be a case of financially biting off more than they can chew.What if, instead, they could regrow their pearly whites, perhaps at a fraction of the cost?Approaches that replace — rather than patch up — teeth with crowns or fillings may be closer than you think. Scientists have been exploring multiple methods in the past few dec ...read more