Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 16, 2025
Researchers in China have used a Mars general circulation model to simulate 50 years of Martian dust activity, aiming to improve forecasts of global dust storms that can disrupt exploration missions. Mars is dominated by a dry, dusty desert landscape where winds and rotating columns of air lift fine particles into the atmosphere and later return them to the surface. The resulting dust cycl

Atlanta GA (SPX) Dec 16, 2025
When NASA scientists opened the sample return canister from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample mission in late 2023, they found something astonishing. Dust and rock collected from the asteroid Bennu contained many of life's building blocks, including all five nucleobases used in DNA and RNA, 14 of the 20 amino acids found in proteins, and a rich collection of other organic molecules

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 12, 2025
Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County extracted building blocks from precise hand gestures in Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form. Their analysis revealed a richer set of movement patterns than those in natural grasps. The team published findings online Nov. 24 in Scientific Reports. Ramana Vinjamuri leads the UMBC lab that studies brain control of complex ha

Satellites are emerging as a powerful new tool in the fight to curb emissions of methane. While methane is much shorter-lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is vastly more potent at trapping heat, which makes rapid cuts essential for slowing warming in the short term. The same satellite technology that has transformed methane monitoring in the oil and gas sector is now being turned towards another major source – landfill sites.

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
Modern large language models are treated as something radically new: vast statistical machines trained on almost everything humans have written, and able to regenerate knowledge on demand. Yet in structural terms, humanity has worked with something similar for millennia.