Science

Ask someone on Earth for the time and they can give you an exact answer, thanks to our planet's intricate timekeeping system, built with atomic clocks, GPS satellites and high-speed telecommunications networks. Ask for the time on Mars and the answer gets much more complicated.

From massive solar panels to the difficulty of staying cool - not to mention high-energy radiation - there are a lot of engineering problems that need to be solved before we can build data centres in space

Ecologist Susan Harrison contributed another batch of photos from her visit to Belize (see part 1 here). The IDs and her captions are indented below, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Belize – Birds of the Mennonite Farmlands

Diverse agricultural landscapes came as a pleasant surprise on a recent birding trip to northern Belize.  Small to medium-sized family farms, neatly arrayed, grew rice, cattle, chickens, fruits and vegetables.  We saw native birds of many kinds in the fields and around the homes, barns, ponds, hedgerows and woodlots.  Is this what U.S. farmlands looked like before the modern agro-industrial era, I wondered?

Many of the farmers are pious German-speaking Mennonites who settled here in the 1950s to practice their ways in a society tolerant of their anti-militarism and anti-modernity. The most conservative among them avoid not only cars but also rubber tires, and use machinery with metal wheels or treads only.  While it felt impolite to photograph the people in their hand-sewn overalls and dresses, I did grab a tractor shot or two.

Mennonite steel-wheeled tractor:

Our main quarry here was the Jabiru (Jabiru mycteria), a massive tropical stork that is scarce in much of its range but flourishes in the northern Belize farm country.

Jabiru in a rice field:

Jabirus mixed with smaller Wood Storks (Mycteria americana) and Northern Jacanas (Jacana spinosa) in a pasture of Brahman cattle:

Other birds we saw in these farmlands:

Laughing Falcons (Herpetotheres cachinnans):

Aplomado Falcons (Falco femoralis):

Bat Falcon (Falco rufigularis) pursuing dragonflies over a rice field at blinding speed:

Fork-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus savana):

Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus):

Mangrove Cuckoo (Coccyzus minor):

Northern Potoo (Nyctibius jamaicensis), a bizarre giant nightjar:

Ringed Kingfisher (Megaceryle torquata):

Roadside Hawk (Rupornis magnirostris):

Morelet’s Seedeater (Sporophila morelleti):

After starting the year with its first known bird flu death, the US expanded its efforts to contain the virus, which enabled it to end its public health emergency response months later

Once again I tender a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: no AI pictures like the one I made below.)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

Rapid advances in the kind of problems that quantum computers can tackle suggest that they are closer than ever to becoming useful tools of scientific discovery

Getting close to things is one way for scientists to collect better data about them. But that's been hard to do for the Sun, since getting close to it typically entails getting burnt to a crisp. Just ask Icarus. But if Icarus had survived his close encounter with the Sun, he might have been able to see massive magnetic “tadpoles” tens of thousands of kilometers wide reconnecting back down to the surface of our star. Or maybe not, because he had human eyes, not the exceptionally sensitive Wide-Field imagers the Parker Solar Probe used to look at the Sun while it made its closest ever pass to our closest star. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters from Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors describes what they say on humanity’s closest brush with the Sun so far.

New laws in the UK, Australia and France were brought in during 2025 with the aim of protecting children from harmful content online, but experts remain divided on whether they will achieve this goal

It's easy to assume that the most talented adults among us were once gifted children, but it turns out that talent during childhood is no guide to later success

Dr. Vinay Prasad: "The establishment, the people who set the policies, they have to strive to get things right. They need to do studies. They need to be held to the highest standard."

The post Dr. Vinay Prasad “Called For” RCTs. Dr. Peter Marks Delivered Them. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Cosmic “touchdown airbursts” — explosions of comets or asteroids above Earth’s surface — may be far more common and destructive than previously thought, according to new research. Unlike crater-forming impacts, these events unleash extreme heat and pressure without leaving obvious scars, making them harder to detect.

Gravitational waves from black holes may soon reveal where dark matter is hiding. A new model shows how dark matter surrounding massive black holes leaves detectable fingerprints in the waves recorded by future space observatories.

Gravitational waves from black holes may soon reveal where dark matter is hiding. A new model shows how dark matter surrounding massive black holes leaves detectable fingerprints in the waves recorded by future space observatories.

In a new paper, a team of researchers explores how non-human species (in this case, fireflies) could inform new approaches in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Astronomers may have just seen the first ever ‘superkilonova,’ a combination of a supernova and a kilonova. These are two very different kinds of stellar explosions, and if this discovery stands, it could change the way scientists understand stellar birth and death.

Excavations of sewer drains at a Roman fort in northern England have revealed the presence of several parasites that can cause debilitating illness in humans

A pair of nascent planets have been caught smashing together around the nearby star Fomalhaut, and in doing so have solved the puzzle of its famous ‘planet’

In 2024, astronomers discovered the brightest Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT) ever observed. LFBOTs are extremely bright flashes of blue light that shine for brief periods before fading away. New analysis of this record-breaking burst, which includes observations from the International Gemini Observatory, funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, challenges all prior understanding of these rare explosive events.

In a glimpse of the early universe, astronomers have observed a galaxy as it appeared just 800 million years after the Big Bang – a cosmic Jekyll and Hyde that looks like any other galaxy when viewed in visible and even ultraviolet light but transforms into a cosmic beast when observed at infrared wavelengths. This object, dubbed Virgil, is forcing astronomers to reconsider their understanding of how supermassive black holes grew in the infant universe.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has played a leading role in providing data, modelling and supercomputing to researchers around the world – but the Trump administration is set to shut it down