The Guardian Science

How will Australia’s emergency services cope if satellites go down? With a sextant and a street directory

Military and SES personnel being taught analog communication and navigation techniques as experts warn solar flare could knock out ‘critical space infrastructure’Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAustralia’s emergency services and military personnel are being trained to read paper maps, navigate without GPS support, and sail by the stars in case something knocks out the nation’s space capabilities.A panel at the 19th Australian space forum in Adelaide on Wednesday was as

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NASA News

Mapping Io’s Hidden Heat With NASA’s Juno

Description This graphic illustrates the areas of Jupiter’s moon Io sampled by the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during two close flybys. The black overlapping lines show the instrument’s footprints during Perijove 57 on Dec. 30, 2023, when the spacecraft primarily mapped the northern hemisphere. The blue lines represent Perijove 58 on […]

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NASA News

NASA’s Juno Peers Beneath Io’s Surface

Description This map represents data captured by the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft, indicating heat rising from just beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io. While infrared instruments measure the temperature of the moon’s surface, the lowest frequency microwave channels (0.6 and 1.25 gigahertz) on the MWR can penetrate between about 6 and […]

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NASA News

NASA’s Juno Takes Temperature of Jupiter’s Fiery Moon Io

 NASA’s Juno mission has provided the first measurements of the temperature below the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io, revealing significant heating within the shallow subsurface of the most volcanically active world in the solar system. Collected during two close flybys, the data also shows that most of Io’s surface is remarkably smooth and composed of […]

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NASA News

NASA Joins Genesis Mission to Accelerate AI-Driven Discovery

NASA is supporting the Genesis Mission, a national effort to drive the use of artificial intelligence in tackling complex scientific and engineering challenges to advance a new era of discovery. President Donald J. Trump issued the Executive Order “Launching the Genesis Mission” on Nov. 24, 2025, creating a national mission to leverage artificial intelligence to […]

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Science Daily

Ancient ferns turned Triassic Europe into a wildfire inferno

Ancient fern savannahs may have transformed parts of Europe into a wildfire-prone inferno during the end-Triassic mass extinction. New fossil evidence suggests the ferns repeatedly regrew after fires, creating fresh fuel that helped prolong the devastation.

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Science Daily

Colorectal cancer warning signs younger adults should never ignore

Colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer death among people under 50, and cases in younger adults continue to rise. Warning signs can include persistent bowel changes, recurring rectal bleeding, dark or narrow stools, unexplained weight loss, and fatigue. These symptoms often have harmless causes, but they should not be dismissed, especially when they are new or ongoing. Early detection can greatly improve treatment outcomes.

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Science Daily

Lab-grown mini brains may predict which Alzheimer’s treatments will work

Miniature brain models grown from patients’ cells revealed striking differences in how Alzheimer’s-related tissue responds to an antidepressant. The organoids and the particles they release could eventually guide more personalized treatments and provide new clues for diagnosing the disease.

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Science Daily

A strange quantum effect dramatically boosts energy transfer

Researchers discovered a proton-assisted mechanism that greatly improves how triplet energy moves between quantum dots and nearby molecules. The proton briefly shifts position, helps coordinate electron movement, and then returns to where it started. This quantum-driven shuttle could offer a powerful new way to tune solar cells, lasers, and catalytic reactions.

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Science Daily

MIT’s new lidar chip could give self-driving cars a wider view

MIT engineers have found a way to give chip-based lidar a wider, clearer view without relying on moving parts. Their design uses differently shaped antennas that can sit close together without scrambling one another’s signals. In tests, the system sharply reduced interference while steering a single precise beam across a broad field of view.

science  3d ago

Science Daily

Scientists revive a powerful antibiotic that superbugs had defeated

Scientists have found a way to revive vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic that some dangerous bacteria have learned to resist. Instead of creating an entirely new drug, researchers paired vancomycin with a small molecule called pghi-4, which blocks a bacterial enzyme linked to resistance. The combination restored the antibiotic’s ability to kill drug-resistant E. faecium, raising hopes that similar chemical helpers could rescue other failing medicines.

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Science Daily

New cancer strategy could stop tumors before resistance takes hold

Researchers are applying evolutionary theory to cancer by changing treatments before tumors have time to develop resistance. Mathematical models suggest that rapid, carefully timed switches between multiple therapies could improve cure rates.

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The Guardian Science

Rivers of magma once bubbled beneath Mars’ crust, research suggests

Finding widens selection of rocky planets that may once have been habitableMars once had rivers of magma bubbling beneath its crust, new research suggests. The surprise find makes it more probable that Mars could have supported life and widens the selection of rocky planets that may once have been habitable.Researchers at the University of Oxford studied data gathered by Nasa’s Insight Lander, which recorded seismic waves caused by meteorite impacts and Martian quakes. They used the seismic data

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Science Daily

Magic mushrooms may reshape the brain long after the trip ends

A single dose of psilocybin produced measurable changes in brain activity and possible changes in brain structure that lasted for up to a month. Participants who experienced the greatest increase in flexible, varied brain activity also reported more personal insight and later improvements in well-being. The findings suggest that the psychedelic experience itself may help people break free from entrenched patterns of thinking.

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The Guardian Science

Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode two – the list

Science correspondent Nicola Davis investigates the strange story of Tam O’Braan and his attempts to grow tea in Scotland.In episode two of this mini-series first broadcast in October 2025, Nicola hears how O’Braan’s network of Scottish tea growers began to have suspicions about exactly what he was selling and where it came from, and how cutting-edge science helped provide some answersA strange brew: the case of the man behind an audacious Scottish tea fraudSupport the Guardian: theguardian.com/

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NASA News

A Week of Smoky Skies Across North America

Brown carbon, emitted by wildland fires and tracked over the span of a week in July 2026, worsened air quality in parts of the U.S. and Canada.

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Science Daily

New programmable photonic chip can control how fast light moves

Scientists have created a programmable optical chip that can slow light on demand, giving engineers far greater control over how optical signals propagate through a circuit. The technology could provide the delays, synchronization, and buffering functions needed to make light-based computing more practical. A single chip could eventually perform several tasks that currently require separate devices, potentially reducing energy use, cost, and complexity in AI servers and data centers.

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Science Daily

Coffee may protect your heart but energy drinks could harm it

For most adults, a daily caffeine habit may be safer for the heart than many people assume. A new American Heart Association review found that up to 400 milligrams of caffeine a day, roughly three to five cups of regular black coffee, is generally safe and may even be linked to lower risks of heart disease, stroke, heart failure, and Type 2 diabetes. But the source matters: highly concentrated energy drinks and shots can sharply raise blood pressure and trigger irregular heart rhythms.

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NASA News

NISAR’s L-Band Radar Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica

Description Data from the Earth-orbiting U.S.-India NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite’s L-band radar was used to produce an image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja — a mountaintop in East Antarctica — poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. The obstruction causes stresses in the ice, heavily fracturing the surrounding surfaces with […]

science  3d ago

NASA News

NASA to Host Media Briefing on Roman Telescope, Launching Next Month

Media are invited to join NASA for a virtual news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 29, to preview the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, scheduled to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, Aug. 30. NASA will stream this event live through a variety of platforms. Learn where […]

science  3d ago