Sep 5th, 2025 - History from countries and communities across the globe, including the world's major wars. The stories behind the faiths, food, entertainment and holidays that shape our world. The Vikings left several clues to the extent of their travels, written in surprising places. Runic inscriptions in Turkey and Italy tell stories of Vikings in the is an important Byzantine structure, first built as a Christian church in the sixth century. It later a mosque and museum, before it was converted back to solely a mosque in 2020. Within its towering columns, domes and gilded mosaics, the names of two ... [Read More]

Sep 5th, 2025 - The National Science Foundation (NSF) said Thursday that it is awarding $16 million to four teams it has selected to build high-tech infrastructure to accelerate quantum science discovery over the next two years.  Those teams will work under NSF's National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NSF NQVL) and will each receive $4 million to give quantum researchers across the country access to specialized resources.  "The National Quantum Virtual Laboratory is a critical bridge between basic discovery and deployment, specifically focused on turning America's leadership in fundamental quantum ... [Read More]

Sep 4th, 2025 - What if we built a super-collider around the Moon? Somewhat surprisingly, scientists and engineers have indeed considered putting a super-collider on the Moon . Such a machine would operate just like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at CERN , near Geneva, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. These 'atom-smashers' create two particle beams travelling in opposite directions through ultra-high-vacuum rings. Strong superconducting electromagnets accelerate the beams to almost the speed of light . The beams are then allowed to collide in one of the detector instruments, ... [Read More]

Sep 4th, 2025 - A bizarre planet-forming disk is full of carbon dioxide in the regions where Earth-like planets could form, fresh observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show. Usually, such planet-forming disks contain water, but "water is so scarce in this system that it's barely detectable — a dramatic contrast to what we typically observe," Jenny Frediani , a doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University and lead author of the research, said in a statement . The findings, published Aug. 29 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, challenge current ideas ... [Read More]

Sep 4th, 2025 - Researchers have completed the first-ever activity map of a mammalian brain in a groundbreaking duo of studies, and it has rewritten scientists' understanding of how decisions are made. The project, involving a dozen labs and data from over 600,000 individual mouse brain cells, covered areas representing over 95% of the brain. Findings from the research, published in two papers in the journal Nature , suggest that decision-making involves far more of the brain than previously thought. The mammoth project was led by the International Brain Laboratory (IBL), a collaboration of experimental and ... [Read More]

Sep 4th, 2025 - A planet's mantle — the vast layer that lies sandwiched between its crust and core — preserves crucial evidence about planetary origin and evolution. Unlike Earth, where active plate tectonics continually stirs the mantle, Mars is a smaller planet with a single-plate surface. As such, its mantle undergoes far less mixing, meaning it may preserve a record of the planet's early internal history, which could offer valuable insights into how rocky worlds form and evolve. Using data from NASA's InSight lander, Constantinos Charalambous from the Imperial College of ... [Read More]

Sep 4th, 2025 - Life on Earth runs on liquid water. Single-celled organisms appeared almost as soon as our planet could sustain them, but multicellular life took around three billion years to emerge. Humans, in comparison, have existed for only the briefest flicker of time – less than one ten-thousandth of Earth's age. That timeline hints at a sobering possibility: watery worlds may be common, but civilizations capable of studying the cosmos – and traveling through it – might be rare. If we want proof of life elsewhere, we may have to go looking for it ourselves. Stars that host stable ... [Read More]

Sep 3rd, 2025 - The state will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop the Quantum Frontier Project, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Tuesday. It's part of the agency's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (TNS) — In 18 months, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said her administration went from thinking about building an ecosystem for quantum technologies in New Mexico to now having a "live, breathing and well-organized" environment in which the industry can thrive. That work by state officials and stakeholders led to Lujan Grisham announcing Tuesday the state's newest partnership with ... [Read More]