Science

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A large ancient wetlands region spanning northern Botswana – once teeming with life but now dominated by desert and salt flats – may represent the ancestral homeland of all of the 7.7 billion people on Earth today, researchers said on Monday. FILE PHOTO: Vanessa Hayes speaks with Headman ǀkun ǀkunta, from an

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon’s secretive X-37B spaceplane landed in Florida on Sunday after a record-long orbital flight lasting more than two years, the U.S. Air Force said, capping the latest test mission for an array of military technologies. The unpiloted X-37B, built by Boeing Co., touched down on an air strip at NASA’s Kennedy

FILE PHOTO: A passenger plane is seen with the full moon behind as it begins its final landing approach to Heathrow Airport in London, Britain, September 24, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA will send a golf cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022 to search for deposits of water below the surface, an

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A revelatory cache of fossils dug up in central Colorado details as never before the rise of mammals from the post-apocalyptic landscape after an asteroid smacked Earth 66 million years ago and annihilated three-quarters of all species including the dinosaurs. Fossilized mammal skull fossils and lower jaw retrieved from the Corral Bluffs

BERLIN/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Wednesday it had achieved a breakthrough in computing research by using a quantum computer to solve in minutes a complex problem that would take today’s most powerful supercomputer thousands of years to crack. Google researchers expect that quantum computers within a few years will fuel advancements

BERLIN (Reuters) – Researchers at Google say they have achieved ‘quantum supremacy’, in which a computer harnessing the properties of sub-atomic particles did a far better job of solving a problem than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. FILE PHOTO: A handout picture from October 2019 shows a component of Google’s Quantum Computer in the Santa

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – (This October 22 story has been refiled to correct headline to say software rather than robotics, first paragraph to clarify that the Olis software would run on a Maxar robotic arm, paragraphs 2 and 3 to state that the robotic arm belongs to Maxar, and paragraph 4 to remove reference to Olis

PIXLEY, Calif. (Reuters) – Joey Airoso has always been proud of his cows, whose milk goes into the butter sold by national dairy company Land O’Lakes. Now he has something new to brag about: the vast amounts of gas produced by his 2,900-head herd is powering truck fleets, homes and factories across the state of

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – For a strange little lemur native to Madagascar that boasts one of the most unusual hands in the animal kingdom, a “high five” is more like a “trick six.” Scientists have discovered that this nocturnal tree dweller, called an aye-aye, possesses an anatomical structure that serves as an extra thumb to go

Interxion managing director Fabrice Coquio is seen at the construction site of Interxion MRS3 data center installed in an old German submarine base built during the Second World War in Marseille, France, October 22, 2019. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier PARIS (Reuters) – The thick concrete walls of a long-abandoned World War Two German submarine base in Marseille,

Founder, Chairman, CEO and President of Amazon Jeff Bezos unveils his space company Blue Origin’s space exploration lunar lander rocket called Blue Moon during an unveiling event in Washington, U.S., May 9, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. billionaire Jeff Bezos said on Tuesday his space company Blue Origin has signed agreements with

Smart Dragon-1 rocket, China’s first rocket designed for commercial use, carrying three satellites lifts off from the launch pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province, China August 17, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer BEIJING (Reuters) – China will launch test flights for the next two space rockets in its Smart Dragon series meant for commercial use in

(Reuters) – U.S. astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir made history on Friday when they stepped outside the International Space Station (ISS) on the first all-female spacewalk. U.S. astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir step out of the International Space Station (ISS) to attempt the first all-female spacewalk, in this still image taken from NASA

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new way of studying planets in other solar systems – by doing sort of an autopsy on planetary wreckage devoured by a type of star called a white dwarf – is showing that rocky worlds with geochemistry similar to Earth may be quite common in the cosmos. In a study published

The “blob”, slime mould (Physarum polycephalum), a single-celled organism forming over over a pieces of tree chunk, is pictured at the Paris Zoological Park during a press preview in Paris, France, October 16, 2019. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier PARIS (Reuters) – A Paris zoo showcased a mysterious new organism on Wednesday, dubbed the “blob”, a yellowish unicellular

LONDON (Reuters) – Uncertainty surrounding Britain’s exit from the European Union has hit science funding to the tune of almost half a billion euros and is putting off international researchers from coming to Britain, a leading institution said on Wednesday. An anti-Brexit protester demonstrates outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium October 11, 2019.