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This Surprising Discovery Rewrites the Milky Way's Origin Story Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a new study examines the origin of a long-standing mystery within the Milky Way: two clearly defined groups of stars...
New Designs for Notre-Dame Windows Displayed, Swedish Climate Activists Acquitted for Smearing Paint on Monet Artwork, and More: Morning Links for December 9, 2025 Notre Dame's New Colors Despite heated controversy over a proposal to replace...
Michelle Hoehn is a cost accountant at NASA's Stennis Space Center, where her work contributes to NASA's Artemis program that will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars. As a seventh grader, the Bogalusa, Louisi...
Demand for electricity is increasing, and the U.S. electric grid will need to expand in response. However, a new study has found a tradeoff between cost, emissions, and reliability when it comes to grid expansion strategies. The study analyzed two p...
Extreme mass-ratio inspirals Researchers have created a fully relativistic model showing that gravitational waves might carry hidden clues about dark matter near massive black holes. The study examines extreme mass-ratio inspirals, or EMRIs: sy...
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Ten years after the first detection of gravitational waves from two merging black holes, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which includes Columbia University astronomer Maximiliano Isi, has captured a remarkably similar event with far greater detai...
Why do neurons die in dementia, and can this process be slowed down? A research group led by Prof. Marcus Conrad, Director of the Institute of Metabolism and Cell Death at Helmholtz Munich and Chair of Translational Redox Biology at the Technical Uni...
People often say that good journalism requires a 30,000-foot view. However, Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler has found the opposite to be true. The stories that move the world rarely start in boardrooms or at summits; they start with someone stand...
Supermassive Black Hole Unleashes Powerful Winds A supermassive black hole about 130 million light-years from Earth has been observed unleashing powerful winds, flinging material out into space at an astonishing 37,282 miles per second - over one...
NASA astronaut Jonny Kim returned to Earth on Tuesday alongside Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, wrapping up an eight-month science mission aboard the International Space Station to benefit life on Earth and future space exp...
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The Sterile Neutrino Hypothesis Neutrinos are extremely small subatomic particles that interact so weakly with matter that they can move straight through entire planets. According to the Standard Model, which serves as the central framework of p...
Capturing Accretion Physics Without Approximations Using cutting-edge algorithms and exascale supercomputers, researchers have created the most detailed model so far of how luminous black holes pull in surrounding matter. For the first time, the...
Searching for an Atmosphere "The basic thesis for TRAPPIST-1e is this: If it has an atmosphere, it's habitable," said Sukrit Ranjan, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "But right now, the first-...
The recent deaths of two white dwarf stars are challenging our understanding of both novae and the powerful physics underlying star death. According to astronomer John Monnier, the initial analysis of these often dramatic novae offers an "extraordina...
Inside every human cell, an extraordinary feat of molecular organization takes place. Roughly six feet of DNA has to be packed into a nucleus that is only about one-tenth the width of a human hair, yet the DNA must remain accessible enough to carry o...
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A study published in the scientific journal Communications Earth & Environment proposes that volcanic activity may have contributed to the rapid movement of the Black Death across medieval Europe. According to the researchers, cooling associated wi...
For more than a decade, cosmology has been stuck with a puzzling contradiction. Two of the most trusted ways of measuring the universe's expansion give two different answers. One set of measurements, based on nearby stars and exploding supernovas, ...
Ancient 'Dirty Dishes' May Have Led Archaeologists Astray for Decades Olive oil has been a kitchen staple for around 8,000 years, so archaeologists often report finding olive oil residue on excavated pottery. However, a new study published in the...
One of the most powerful volcanic events of the past 10,000 years occurred on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea. Researchers have long debated whether this eruption took place in the late 17th or 16th century BCE. Ash from the e...
Fever, aching limbs, and a runny nose—as winter returns, so too does the flu. The disease is triggered by influenza viruses, which enter our body through droplets and then infect cells. Researchers from Switzerland and Japan have now investigated th...
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Researchers from the University of Vienna have observed the melting process of ultra-thin materials in unprecedented detail. Their findings not only challenge existing beliefs about the process but could also advance our understanding of phase transi...
Earth's Early Oceans Hid the Secret Rise of Complex Life New findings suggest that complex life began forming much earlier, and over a far longer period, than researchers previously understood. The study provides fresh insight into the environmen...
29 People Share Things That Are 'Technically True' And You Can't Argue With This Logic Fans of horror stories and video games are bound to know American writer, H. P. Lovecraft, as his name is pretty much on everything these days: Lovecraftian-th...
What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the red planet's watery past? A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences aims to address this by mapping Martian river basins for the first time. ...
Socially Awkward People Have Thrived Through History Many people experience social awkwardness from time to time, but for some, it happens much more often. They accidentally say the wrong thing, miss social cues, or are simply overly shy at parti...
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NASA's broadcast of the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse has won an Emmy Award for Excellence in Production Technology. At the 76th Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards on Dec. 4, in New York City, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announce...
Ramanujan's Timeless Formulas Unlock Modern Physics More than a century ago, legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote down a set of 17 short formulas that could calculate the digits of pi with incredible accuracy using very few st...
Student teams competed in the 2025 Invention Challenge at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Dec. 5. The annual event pits middle and high school teams against each other as they try to get handmade devices to accomplish a specific task. For ...
People who frequently include foods and beverages rich in polyphenols, such as tea, coffee, berries, cocoa, nuts, whole grains and olive oil, may experience better heart health over time. A team from King's College London reported that individuals w...
Hubble Space Telescope Captures Second Image of Comet 3I/ATLAS The Hubble Space Telescope has captured another stunning image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it races through our solar system at an incredible speed of 130,000 miles per hour...
Brightcast is dedicated to restoring faith in humanity by highlighting the progress, solutions, and kindness that often go unnoticed. We believe in a balanced worldview.
Read our full mission →
Seismology Unlocks the Secrets of Soil It felt like a breakthrough moment. After years of struggling with the complexities of soil, George Monbiot and a team of researchers may have stumbled upon a revolutionary new approach - using seismology to...
U.S. Introduces First Female Crash Test Dummy to Close Decades-Long Safety Gap In a move hailed as decades overdue, the U.S. Department of Transportation introduced the country's first crash test dummy modeled on female anatomy. The new model, ca...
Fossils can reveal a lot about the animals that lived millions of years ago, but rarely do they depict the exact cause of an animal's death. However, a 120-million-year-old bird specimen housed at China's Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature may be the e...
Writing may seem like just another mundane, ordinary task. However, research shows that translating thoughts and feelings into words can calm stress, sharpen emotional awareness, and help you navigate life's challenges with more clarity and confidenc...
Sometimes, geothermal hot spots are obvious, marked by geysers and hot springs on the planet's surface. But in other places, they're obscured thousands of feet underground. Now, AI could help uncover these hidden pockets of potential power. A startu...
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Around 25 million Americans have rare genetic diseases, and many struggle with a lack of effective treatments and clear diagnoses. Researchers have looked to the human genome for answers, but up to 70% of patients still lack a clear genetic explanati...
NASA's next major observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has now been fully assembled. On November 25, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the telescope at the largest clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Gr...
Unlike our eyes and ears, which come in pairs, our nostrils may not seem dramatically different from each other. However, the fact that we have two nostrils, rather than one large hole, plays a vital role in our overall health and sensory experience....
Fever, aching limbs and a runny nose -- as winter returns, so too does the flu. The disease is triggered by influenza viruses, which enter our body through droplets and then infect vulnerable cells. A research team from Switzerland and Japan has tak...
Astronomers Discover One of the Largest Rotating Structures in the Universe Astronomers have identified an extraordinary cosmic structure - a massive, spinning filament containing a chain of 14 galaxies located 140 million light-years from Earth....