Dec 12th, 2025 - Vanderbilt University and the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga are looking for a downtown space for the Institute for Quantum Innovation, where up to 260 Vanderbilt faculty, staff and students will live and work. (TNS) — Hundreds of Vanderbilt University faculty and students will live and work in Chattanooga at a quantum institute launched through a partnership with EPB (Electric Power Board) after Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly and other officials invited the powerhouse university to work with the local utility. Vanderbilt anticipates placing up to 260 faculty, staff and students at ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - You know how it goes: You're trying to get some shut-eye in your bunk after a long shift of scraping samples of prebiotic material from red rocks in Utopia Planitia, and before you know it, your alarm bell rings. And then you see it woke you up a full 477 microseconds early! Life on Mars is tough. Figuring out the exact time isn't much easier. Even on the larger end of the timescale, Martian chronometry is not exactly simple; the planet takes about 687 Earth days to go around the sun, making calendrical coordination with Earth pretty hairy . It also spins on its axis—completing one ... [Read More]

Dec 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Stars have long raised big questions for astronomers, especially when they look at some of the brightest objects in space and wonder how they formed so fast. These objects are quasars, powered by supermassive black holes that already existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Normal stars growing and merging cannot build black holes that heavy in such a short amount of time. The puzzle pushed scientists to look for a more dramatic origin story. One idea was that the first generation of stars included "monster stars" weighing between 1,000 and 10,000 times ... [Read More]

Dec 11th, 2025 - Cutting off reproduction — from birth control to castration — consistently adds years to life across species, even humans. If you've ever joked that dating is killing you, science may have just backed you up. According to a massive new study, animals that skip sex — or at least stop reproducing — tend to live longer. I mean, way longer. Whether it's a lion, a lemur, or a lab rat, blocking reproduction through sterilization or birth control adds roughly 10 to 20 percent to their lifespan. Evolutionary biologist Shinichi Nakagawa, a co-author and professor at the ... [Read More]

Dec 11th, 2025 - Regular, alternating layers in Gale Crater may have been deposited as the result of tides raised by a moon at least 18 times the mass of Phobos, a study says. Thin layers of sedimentary rock in Mars's Gale Crater suggest that the planet once had a moon much larger than the two that orbit it today,  according to work  to be presented at AGU's Annual Meeting 2025 on 17 December. Unlike the current Martian moons  Phobos  and  Deimos , the gravitational pull of the hypothesized moon would have been strong enough to create tides in bodies of water on or below the planet's ... [Read More]

Dec 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Coral reefs are under relentless strain. Warming seas, polluted runoff, and heavy fishing are steadily chipping away at their resilience. Coral reefs are undeniably struggling, yet the ways they react and adapt as a connected community remain unexpectedly complex. A new study brings that complexity into view and hints at a strategy that could support their long-term resilience. Advantages for connected reefs Reefs aren't isolated. They exchange larvae , support nearby ecosystems, and move in step as conditions shift. That basic idea becomes striking once you realize ... [Read More]

Dec 11th, 2025 - Mars lacks the plate tectonics that drive Earth's river systems, yet it once hosted massive waterways. We've known for a while that Mars was once a wet world. But there's always been a geological puzzle regarding how and where that water moved. On Earth, rivers are largely driven by plate tectonics. The shifting of our planet's crust builds mountains and basins, creating the slopes necessary for water to flow. Mars, however, never had an active tectonic system like ours. Yet, even without it, the Red Planet managed to sustain impressive waterways. A new study reveals that ancient Martian ... [Read More]

Dec 11th, 2025 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Scientists say they've developed a breakthrough 3D wiring solution that allows a 100-fold increase in the number of quantum bits (qubits) a quantum computing chip can support. Typical quantum computing processors (QPUs) are built with two-dimensional, horizontal wiring, just like the central processing units (CPUs) in our classical devices. But this traditional wiring limits the number of ... [Read More]