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The Orion Nebula provides a master class in the study of newly born stars as the closest starbirth region to us. Yet, many of its youngest ones are still swaddled in their birth creches, hidden by clouds of gas and dust. The Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescopes have managed to punch through the dusty obscuring veil to study a pair of young binary systems called Brun 656 and HD 294300 born in the Nebula.

Our most massive satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), has been the center of a heated debate in the astrophysics community over the last few years. That debate centers on whether this is the LMC’s first or second “pass” by the Milky Way itself - and it has huge implications for the evolution of our galaxy given the disruption such a large grouping of stars has. A new paper from Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Sapna Mishra, and Andrew J. Fox and his co-authors, currently available in pre-print on arXiv, provides what they claim to be definitive evidence that this is, in fact, the first time LMC has encountered the Milky Way.

Rogue planets sound like rare travelers amongst the stars, freed from the gravitational constraints of a host system, left to forever wander the interstellar void. But modern models suggest these Free Floating Planets (FFPs) as they are technically known, are actually very common - nineteen times more common than planets beyond the “snow line”, which is the distance from the central star where it becomes cold enough that hydrogen compounds like water, ammonia, and methane can condense into ice. But why are FFPs so common? What forces them out of the stellar systems where they form? A new paper from Xiaochen Zheng of the Beijing Planetarium and his co-authors, available in pre-print in arXiv, offers a plausible explanation - planetary “bouncers”.

Scientists have created a powerful new way to control quantum systems, achieving the first-ever demonstration of quadsqueezing—an elusive fourth-order quantum effect. By combining simple forces in a clever way, they made previously hidden quantum behaviors visible and usable, opening new frontiers for quantum technology.

Scientists have created a powerful new way to control quantum systems, achieving the first-ever demonstration of quadsqueezing—an elusive fourth-order quantum effect. By combining simple forces in a clever way, they made previously hidden quantum behaviors visible and usable, opening new frontiers for quantum technology.

A team at King’s College London has created a powerful new aluminum compound capable of doing the work of expensive rare metals. Its unique triangular structure gives it remarkable stability and reactivity, allowing it to drive chemical reactions in ways never seen before. The discovery could lead to greener and far more affordable industrial processes. It may even enable the creation of entirely new materials.

An infestation of caterpillars can make an oak tree postpone when it opens its leaves next year by three days, wrong-footing the insects when they attack again

With progress at COP climate meetings stalling, 57 countries took part in the first of a new series of conferences aiming to develop roadmaps away from fossil fuels, but big emitters like China and the US were absent

Silvia Park, author of the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, reveals how a book that was originally intended to be for children took a darker route following a death in the family

In this extract from Luminous, the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet a mysterious robot discovered in a salvage yard in Seoul, in a future reunified Korea

Uranus’s outermost two rings are surprisingly dissimilar, which opens up a mystery about the tiny moons and moonlets that form them

I don't understand why public health figures like Jay Bhattacharya who controlled 58 billion dollars of funding uh didn't use that money to study it definitively and with running high quality trials.

The post Scientific Censor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Doesn’t Realize He’s the Medical Establishment Now & It’s His Job to Generate Evidence for the American People first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The implications of quantum mechanics suggest reality isn't as solid as we think it is, but physicist David Bohm had a spin on the theory that restores reality. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explores how we could test Bohmian mechanics – and if it will ever become more widely accepted

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.

Astronomers now believe there is at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way but new research has revealed a deeply unsettling twist in that picture. The most common planets in our Galaxy, it turns out, are almost entirely absent around the most common stars. Using data from NASA's TESS satellite, researchers found that the small, faint stars that make up the vast majority of the Milky Way seem to host rocky super Earths in abundance, but virtually no sub Neptunes, the planet type previously thought to be plentiful. The finding doesn't just refine existing theories of planet formation, it rewrites them.

An international team of astrophysicists has just released one of the largest cosmological datasets ever assembled. A mouthwatering 2.5 petabytes of simulated universe, freely available to researchers anywhere in the world. Built using a supercomputer and a suite of simulations called FLAMINGO, the data models how matter has evolved since the Big Bang, tracing everything from individual galaxies to the vast cosmic web that stretches across billions of light years.

When NASA's Artemis II crew swung around the Moon in April, the world watched in extraordinary detail and a breakthrough laser communications system was the reason why. Bolted to the outside of the Orion capsule, a compact optical terminal beamed 484 gigabytes of data back to Earth using invisible infrared light, outpacing traditional radio systems by a factor of tens. The result was some of the most vivid imagery ever captured in deep space, and a technology demonstration that will fundamentally change how humanity communicates beyond Earth.

Our Sun is a bit of an outlier in the general stellar population. We typically think of stars as being solitary wanderers throughout the galaxy. But roughly half of Sun-like stars are locked in with more than one companion star. If there are two, it’s known as a “binary” system, but in many cases there are even more stars all collectively tied together by gravity. Astronomers have long debated why this happens, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Ryan Sponzilli, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, makes an argument for a mechanism known as disk fragmentation.

A cryptocurrency that aims to avoid the disastrous energy consumption of bitcoin is actually using 18 times more energy than its makers claim – but it promises improvements are on the way

An ambitious study has explored how the oral microbiome may affect our metabolic health, raising hopes that conditions like pre-diabetes could one day be screened for via a simple mouth swab