science

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cz93xzv3njjo

The first orbital rocket made and designed in Australia crashed 14 seconds after lift-off during its first test launch.

Videos show the Eris rocket, launched by Gilmour Space Technologies, lifting off the ground before losing momentum and crashing.

https://archive.ph/ZnGMu

Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on long-debunked research

A new Trump administration report which attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding”, which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown.

“Climate change is a challenge – not a catastrophe,” wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report’s introduction.

Esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect “if you took a chat bot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites”.

Epilogue: After that film was finished, the team went on to drill the deepest ice core ever drilled in the Americas

https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2025/05/deepest-ice-core-in-the-americas-drilled-in-canadian-arctic.html

The world’s “oldest baby” has been born in the US from an embryo that was frozen in 1994, it has been reported.

Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on 26 July in Ohio to Lindsey and Tim Pierce, using an “adopted” embryo from Linda Archerd, 62, from more than 30 years ago.

In the early 1990s, Archerd and her then husband decided to try in vitro fertilisation (IVF) after struggling to become pregnant. In 1994 four embryos resulted: one was transferred to Archerd and resulted in the birth of a daughter, who is now 30 and mother to a 10-year-old. The other embryos were cryopreserved and stored.

“We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records,” Lindsey told the MIT Technology Review, which first reported the story. “We just wanted to have a baby.”

Abstract

Intelligence is correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs. This may suggest intelligence directly alters our political views. Alternatively, the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors. We studied the effect of intelligence within a sample of over 300 biological and adoptive families, using both measured IQ and polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment. We found both IQ and polygenic scores significantly predicted all six of our political scales. Polygenic scores predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within-families. Intelligence was able to significantly predict social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within families, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables. Our findings may provide the strongest causal inference to date of intelligence directly affecting political beliefs.

“I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”

Teams of scientists are researching the unique ways that elite sport affects the female body – how breasts alter the way you run, but the right sports bra could give you the edge; how the menstrual cycle could impact performance and what role period trackers could play; and why is there a higher risk of some injuries, and what can be done to avoid them?

About 20% of the employees at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration are set to depart the space agency, a NASA spokesperson said on Friday.

The thought of all these mosquitoes might make one's skin crawl. But Cabral thinks of them as her babies, and she says these insects deserve more praise than loathing. That's because they've been engineered to shut down the transmission of the very diseases they usually carry and spread.

And it's why the Brazilian government has made a massive investment to create and deploy this tiny winged armada across the country — to join their other national efforts to combat mosquito-borne diseases.

Cabral has every confidence in these mosquitoes. "They can help us," she says.

You fucked with squirrels, Morty!

Lately there has been a lot of controversy about age verification and it's implementation in places such as UK and US.

The main critic to this mechanism is due being done through facial recognition or a government ID which are privacy invasive.

So here is my question as someone who comes from IT, wouldn't it be possible to create a device which just gives out true or false depending if the person is of age, given some kind of piece of DNA (hair, blood, nails) ?

I known there is carbon dating, but from what I understand is a bit of complicated process. The human body however shows it's age visually and I would be interested to know if genetically there are some signs as well that could be somewhat used in a automatic process.

Again I come from IT, just curious about the implications and your takes on the problem.

Twenty years later, Edison would be selling (his lowest cost) cylinder phonographs for US $20. At the time, East coast pro carpenters were making about $2.50 a day.

For nearly two decades, no one had spotted the world’s smallest-known snake.

Some scientists worried that maybe the Barbados threadsnake had become extinct, but one sunny morning, Connor Blades lifted a rock in a tiny forest in the eastern Caribbean island and held his breath.

“After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic,” said Blades, project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados.

The snake can fit comfortably on a coin, so it was able to elude scientists for almost 20 years. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, Blades placed it in a small glass jar and added soil, substrate and leaf litter.