Published on: 2025-06-05 11:15:55
The importance of free software to science [LWN subscriber-only content] Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! Free software plays a critical role in science, both in research and in disseminating it. Aspects of software freed
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-11 16:00:48
They're dropping like flies. Angry Sun Now that more than 7,000 Starlink satellites are orbiting our planet, scientists have been given a golden opportunity to study the effects the Sun's activity can have on the aggregate lifespans of such minimalist, constellation-based spacecraft. As New Scientist reports, it's turning out that ferocious solar storms caused by the Sun pelting our atmosphere with energized particles can significantly reduce the crafts' lifetimes, by prematurely pushing them
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-20 04:11:01
Researchers have found that the thick and hazy atmosphere enveloping Saturn's largest moon, Titan, behaves in a very peculiar way. As detailed in a new paper published in The Planetary Science Journal, a team of scientists analyzed 13 years' worth of thermal infrared observations recorded by NASA and the European Space Agency's Cassini-Huygens mission. Their finding: that Titan's atmosphere wobbles like a gyroscope as it shifts with the seasons of its nearly 30 Earth-year cycle, instead of spi
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-17 01:28:15
Biologists and chemists have a new programming language to uncover previously unknown environmental pollutants at breakneck speed – without requiring them to code. By making it easier to search massive chemical datasets, the tool has already identified toxic compounds hidden in plain sight. UCR computer scientist Mingxun Wang in his laboratory. Wang created the new programming language for scientists. (Stan Lim/UCR) Mass spectrometry data is like a chemical fingerprint, showing scientists what
Keywords: chemicals data language scientists wang
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-03 03:08:22
Images sent back by NASA's Viking spacecraft in the 1970s revealed some unusual streaks stretching across the arid landscapes of Mars. The sighting had scientists excited about the possibility of free-flowing water on an otherwise desolate planet. The streaks — which, at times, were thousands of feet long — appeared much darker, contrasting against the mostly monotonal, surrounding hills, looking as if somebody had spilled an enormous glass of water on a patch of hilly sand. But decades later,
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-04 09:00:52
Saturn’s most metal moon just got more intriguing. On Titan, clouds of methane unleash a cold, oily rain—very different from the water-based downpours we see on Earth. For the first time, scientists have collected evidence of cloud convection in Titan’s northern hemisphere, observing the moon’s methane clouds shifting over time above its eerie lakes. By combining data from the Webb space telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, a group of scientists observed Titan’s clouds rising to higher
Keywords: clouds methane moon scientists titan
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-04 03:00:50
In the 1960s, physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that advanced alien civilizations could be building enormous megastructures around a star to harness its energy. Such a move would allow a civilization to advance from a Type I to a Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale, harvesting the energy available from a star directly instead of from a given planet's surface. These shells, dubbed Dyson spheres, could be giving off distinct technosignatures, astronomers have suggested, making them observ
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-10 00:00:27
On March 18, 2024, the Sun swung a large bubble of plasma toward the direction of Mars. The eruption of the solar storm led to an auroral display across the Martian sky, which glowed with a greenish hue. A group of scientists used the Perseverance rover to look up at the sky and capture Mars’ visible aurora for the first time. Scientists used Perseverance’s SuperCam spectrometer and Mastcam-Z camera to observe a visible aurora on Mars, identifying the exact spectral line causing the green emiss
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-20 10:29:22
Astronomers have made an intriguing discovery that could upend everything we know about the structure of the universe and its expansion. Scientists recently found that dark energy, the mysterious form driving the accelerating expansion of the universe, could be weakening over time. The findings could undermine the existing standard cosmological model of the universe called the lambda-cold dark matter (LCDM) model, which takes dark energy, ordinary matter, and cold dark matter — a hypothetical
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-26 19:45:42
Physicists say they've built the first-ever "black hole bomb" — an ominous-sounding concept that dates back to the late 1960s, but that serves as little more than a harmless proof of concept. As New Scientist reports, the idea is to boost energy with a black hole, then trap it with mirrors until you get an explosion. However, what the team created in a lab is a harmless test, without a real black hole that could suck the planet into oblivion. And instead of looking for ways to wipe enemy alien
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-28 08:15:25
The distinctive chirps of singing cicadas are a highlight of summer in regions where they proliferate; those chirps even featured prominently on Lorde's 2021 album Solar Power. Now, Japanese scientists at the University of Tsukuba have figured out how to transform cicadas into cyborg insects capable of "playing" Pachelbel's Canon. They described their work in a preprint published on the physics arXiv. You can listen to the sounds here. Scientists have been intrigued by the potential of cyborg i
Keywords: 2021 cicadas electrodes implanting scientists
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-30 00:16:33
FutureHouse, an Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit that aims to build an “AI scientist” within the next decade, has launched its first major product: a platform and API with AI-powered tools designed to support scientific work. Many, many startups are racing to develop AI research tools for the scientific domain, some with massive amounts of VC funding behind them. Tech giants seem bullish, too, on AI for science. Earlier this year, Google unveiled the “AI co-scientist,” an AI the company said could
Keywords: ai futurehouse scientific scientist tools
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-08 17:39:00
The big picture: A growing number of American researchers are exploring scientific careers outside the United States, spurred by deep funding reductions and political interference that have upended the nation's research environment. Recent figures from Nature's global science jobs platform highlight this trend: in the first quarter of 2025, applications from US-based scientists for overseas positions climbed by 32 percent compared to a year earlier. Meanwhile, the number of American users search
Keywords: american applications percent research scientists
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-09 08:39:00
The big picture: A growing number of American researchers are exploring scientific careers outside the United States, spurred by deep funding reductions and political interference that have upended the nation's research environment. Recent figures from Nature's global science jobs platform highlight this trend: in the first quarter of 2025, applications from US-based scientists for overseas positions climbed by 32 percent compared to a year earlier. Meanwhile, the number of American users search
Keywords: applications nature percent research scientists
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-16 06:32:49
About 50 miles northwest of London sits a very old wishing well. Romans used to toss objects into the water here, offering items to the gods for good luck. Nearly 2,000 years later, archaeologists are still finding ancient artifacts from what is now a large, muddy pit, including coins, ceramic pots, shoes, and even bones from between 270 and 300 AD. The site is called Berryfields, which has an Iron Age Roman settlement along its southern edge and medieval earthworks are visible in the northeast
Keywords: egg roman romans scientists site
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-17 12:32:49
About 50 miles northwest of London sits a very old wishing well. Romans used to toss objects into the water here, offering items to the gods for good luck. Nearly 2,000 years later, archaeologists are still finding ancient artifacts from what is now a large, muddy pit, including coins, ceramic pots, shoes, and even bones from between 270 and 300 AD. The site is called Berryfields, which has an Iron Age Roman settlement along its southern edge and medieval earthworks are visible in the northeast
Keywords: egg roman romans scientists site
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-29 20:31:05
Federal scientists responsible for monitoring the health of West Coast fisheries are cleaning office bathrooms and reconsidering critical experiments after the Department of Commerce failed to renew their lab’s contracts for hazardous waste disposal, janitorial services, IT, and building maintenance. Trash is piling up at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staffers told ProPublica. Ecologists, chemists, and biologists at Montlake
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-30 00:00:46
Humans have been pondering the existence of life beyond Earth since ancient times. In the 1900s, scientists began actively searching for proof. Needless to say, we still haven’t found any. Although it’s only been a number of decades and technology is advancing every day, what if we continue to come up empty-handed? In a study published Monday in The Astronomical Journal, an international team of researchers tackled this question by arguing that what we don’t find can still be deeply informative
Keywords: exoplanets life planets scientists study
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-31 16:02:54
A pair of astrophotographers teamed up with scientists to help them solve the mystery of “sprite fireworks.” On the night of May 19, 2022, two Chinese astrophotographers, Angel An and Shuchang Dong, captured a spectacular display of over one hundred red sprites over the Himalayas. Red sprites are an elusive form of lightning that is discharged into the upper atmosphere, which scientists still don’t fully understand. The pair of astrophotographers were shooting at an observation site, located
Keywords: astrophotographers lightning red scientists sprites
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-09-10 07:30:38
In the deserts of Africa and the Middle East, scientists have discovered tiny tubes that appear to have been made by something alive. In a press release, researchers from Germany's Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz described their surprise upon finding these bizarre tubular tunnels in marble and limestone. "We were surprised," explained Cees Passchier, who first found the tunnels in Namibia 15 years ago, "because these tubes are clearly not the result of a geological process." In a new pape
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-09-17 08:12:11
Several top scientists charged with overseeing research into disease prevention and cures at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were notified that they were subject to a reduction in force on Tuesday as part of a devastating purge of federal employees carried out by US Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., WIRED has learned. Multiple sources at the NIH, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, confirmed Tuesday afternoon that at least 10 pr
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-09-18 12:33:13
is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. More than 1,900 scientists and engineers have signed a letter saying they “see real danger in this moment” as the Trump administration slashes federal support for scientific research. “Wise investments by the US government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, makin
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-09-21 13:15:17
Scientists are suggesting there may be a brand new type of life — or, at least, that one existed back in the day. In a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, scientists from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland argue that the massive and mysterious tubelike fossils known as "prototaxites" deserve their own life form classification because, basically, they're too weird to belong to any other. Since their discovery in the 1800s, prototaxites have long been a head-scratcher and a point of content
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-09-27 16:13:01
We’ve reached a new frontier in organ transplantation. In a medical first, scientists announced this week that they successfully kept a genetically modified pig liver functioning inside a human body—at least for a short while. Researchers in China detailed their groundbreaking accomplishment in a study published today in Nature. They transplanted the liver into a brain-dead recipient, where it was able to survive and even perform some basic functions for over a week. The findings are the latest
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-09-27 01:19:07
Scientists scrutinizing the seafloor beneath a calving iceberg found a remarkable array of living creatures, switching up notions of how the giant chunks of ice affect their immediate environs. The scientists investigated a region of seafloor recently exposed by the calving of a gigantic iceberg—A-84—which is as large as Chicago. The team found a surprisingly vibrant community of critters on the seafloor below where A-84 was once attached to an ice shelf attached to Antarctica. “We didn’t expe
Keywords: ice life scientists seafloor team
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-10-02 23:00:46
Scientists scrutinizing the seafloor beneath a calving iceberg found a remarkable array of living creatures, switching up notions of how the giant chunks of ice affect their immediate environs. The scientists investigated a region of seafloor recently exposed by the calving of a gigantic iceberg—A-84—which is as large as Chicago. The team found a surprisingly vibrant community of critters on the seafloor below where A-84 was once attached to an ice shelf attached to Antarctica. “We didn’t expe
Keywords: ice life scientists seafloor team
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-10-06 22:00:00
The space science community has long prided itself on its ability to inspire and move people of all backgrounds, but President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders demanding the end of diversity programs have thrown that optimism into chaos. In response, NASA has suspended funding for diversity and outreach programs, paused the meetings of community groups that interface with space scientists, and banned the activities of internal employee resource groups for women, queer people, and others.
Keywords: diversity nasa science scientists space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-10-09 03:10:48
Global sea levels rose faster than expected last year, largely due to warming ocean temperatures, a new NASA analysis found. As seawater creeps further into coastlines, salt threatens to pollute the freshwater reserves that people depend on. But this brine isn’t just coming from the ocean: New research shows freshwater ecosystems are facing widespread dual threats of salt contamination from the sea and land, made worse by climate change. Humans are a salty species, using the mineral for a vast
Keywords: nasa ocean rise scientists sea
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-10-12 06:35:04
Image by Getty / Futurism It's been nearly three years since controversial Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison for gene-hacking human babies — and now, he appears to be hitting back at the rules that led to his punishment. In a cryptic post on X that featured a photo of the scientist blankly staring directly into the camera, He wrote that "ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress." Though he doesn't mention it directly, that post seems like a clear refere
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Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-10-16 19:26:23
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, displays the new Blackwell GPU chip during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2024. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is expected to reveal details about Rubin, the chipmaker's next AI graphics processor, on Tuesday at the company's annual GTC conference. While other tech companies usually name their products using combinations of inscrutable letters and numbers, most of Nvidia's most recent GPU architectures have been n
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