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 - You can now listen to Fox News articles! Swedish archaeologists recently uncovered remnants of a forgotten 16th-century city beneath modern-day Gothenburg. The excavation was conducted by Arkeologerna, a Swedish archaeological consultancy, earlier this autumn. Researchers focused on Olskroken, a district east of central Gothenburg — Sweden's second-largest city after Stockholm. What they found were the remnants of a place called Nya Lödöse, a short-lived town founded by Swedish regent Sten Sture the Elder in 1473. With its strategic location near the North Sea, Nya ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - Dec. 10 (UPI) -- NASA has lost contact with MAVEN, a spacecraft that has been orbiting Mars for more than 11 years and one of only three circling the red planet. On Tuesday, NASA said it lost contact with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN spacecraft on Sunday. According to telemetry, MAVEN was working normally before passing behind Mars as seen from Earth. Communications didn't resume after the orbiter emerged from behind the planet. "The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation," NASA said. "More information will be shared once it ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - Claims of leaps in quantum computing are made almost daily, but progress is hard to judge when each research group uses its own mixture of hardware, algorithms and evaluation metrics, making it near impossible to compare systems. Now, researchers are trying to make it easier to chart the performance of quantum machines. As part of an ongoing effort, a consortium of UK researchers has created a suite of metrics that they say is a holistic way to measure the performance of quantum computers. They have published the work alongside a library of open-source software 1 . Separately, a group ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - NASA has lost contact with a spacecraft that has orbited Mars for more than a decade. Maven, an acronym for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, abruptly stopped communicating with ground stations on Dec. 6. NASA said this week that it was working fine before it went behind the red planet. When it reappeared, there was only silence. Launched in 2013 and having entered Mars' orbit in September 2014, Maven began studying the upper Martian atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Scientists ended up blaming the sun for Mars losing most of its atmosphere to space over the eons, ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - Ultra-fast single-shot tensor computing trades 1s and 0s for light waves Want to call someone a quick-thinker? The easiest cliché for doing so is calling her a computer – in fact, "computers" was the literal job title of the " Hidden Figures " mathematicians who drove the success of early NASA. But while modern electronic computers are far faster than even those mathematical geniuses were with paper, pencils, and slide rules, there's another type of computing that leaves it eating space dust –  optical computing, as fast as the speed of light because instead of ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers are now using the first generations of stars and galaxies to understand what really fills most of space. These systems formed when the universe was only a few hundred million years old and they carry clues in their light. The new work looks at galaxies seen by the James Webb Space Telescope and compares them with detailed computer models. By matching real galaxies to simulated ones, scientists find that both cold and relatively heavy warm dark matter ( WDM ) can still explain the early data. Why dark matter needs a new test The work was led by Umberto Maio, ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - MARATHON, Fla. (WFLA)— Twenty-five critically endangered sea turtles arrived in the Florida Keys after fighting for their lives. The 25 cold-stunned sea turtles arrived at the Florida Keys Turtle Hospital to warm up after being rescued by volunteers in Cape Cod. According to the Florida Keys, the Kemp's ridley juvenile sea turtles were rescued after a cold-stunning event in Cape Cod that left them stranded, hypothermic, and unable to swim. "We get a lot of visitors to the Florida Keys during the winter months," said Turtle Hospital manager Bette Zirkelbach. "These are very special ... [Read More]