Alex Wilkins
journalist with New Scientist focusing on physics, space and tech.
alex-wilkins.com
- This is one of the most intriguing stories I've ever worked on: what would be the largest meteorite of all time lost in the west African desert that, despite countless searches, was never found. Overnight camel rides, poisoned chieftains, meteorite science. www.newscientist.com/article/2507...
- In 1989, it seemed like room-temperature nuclear fusion might be possible, solving the world's energy problems. But cold fusion, as it was known, was soon dead in the water after failed replications. Now, a new experiment has resurrected its ghost ☢️ www.newscientist.com/article/2493...
- These gorgeous origami shapes - an entirely new family called bloom patterns - could be used to design new, more effective space telescopes or solar panels. www.newscientist.com/article/2493...
- We've all been caught in the annoying perpetual loop of removing and putting on a jacket when the weather is temperamental ⛅ This jacket gets thinner when you sweat and puffs up when your skin is dry, meaning you can wear it come rain or shine. www.newscientist.com/article/2492...
- A flash of light from cosmic noon, billions of years ago, could be used to illuminate all the shadowy gas in-between us and the early universe 💥 www.newscientist.com/article/2492...
- If you've ever wanted to know how best to play Guess Who? and make your chances of winning around 65% each time, then you should follow this strategy devised by mathematicians. www.newscientist.com/article/2491...
- Our best hope for alien life, as astronomers reported earlier this year, seems to be fading away. New observations of K2-18b can't find any strong evidence for the apparent biosignature that got many excited. www.newscientist.com/article/2489...
- You'd expect the first stars to form at the beginning of the universe but surprisingly, astronomers have found a galaxy full of just-born stars much, much later (hundreds of millions of years later) www.newscientist.com/article/2489...
- There might be ~no limit~ to how hot you can heat a solid beyond its melting point* *as long as you do it very, very quickly. www.newscientist.com/article/2489...
- The ground has been moving under our feet for longer than we thought 🌍 Scientists have found evidence of tectonic plate-like activity hundreds of millions of years further back, at 3.5 billion years. (plus the earliest known reversal of Earth's magnetic core!) www.newscientist.com/article/2488...
- Weird plants! Ancient Earth! Meteorites! The strange story of the horsetail plant, and its unique ability to distil water up its stem, could tell us all sorts of fascinating things about what Earth was like billions of years ago www.newscientist.com/article/2487...
- Have we found evidence of alien life? The picture is getting much, much murkier. Last month, astronomers said they'd found "strong evidence" of alien life. They've now reanalysed the data and found more possible molecules that fit the data. www.newscientist.com/article/2480...
- Nikku Madhusudhan, one of the original researchers, said this makes him "slightly more confident" the original detection of the apparent biomolecule dimethyl sulphide was correct. But other researchers have the opposite view, saying it is a "major change in interpretation within just one month".
- Scientists often have disagreements about how to interpret data and results, but it's quite remarkable just how wide the range of interpretations has become for whether we have found life on K2-18b.
- Training an AI model on the English population's health data is a massive legal and ethical grey area, but researchers have done it anyway. It *might* one day help doctors predict disease, but it's unclear whether it ever can without breaking the law. www.newscientist.com/article/2479...
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- Their online splash was different, which is maybe what you're remembering bsky.app/profile/rowh...
- Sensational claims of life on another planet are just that - claims. What would we need for those claims to be verified? More work from independent groups, more data and a real look at non-biological alternatives, which could take years, or forever. www.newscientist.com/article/2477...
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- True - but another caveat to the caveat. The apparent concentrations of DMS, *if true* (big if), are far greater than the small concentrations found in comets, and would require an insanely high rate of cometary delivery to sustain the levels that might be in K2-18b's atmosphere.
- It's important to find whether alternative abiotic processes exist, but they would also need to be capable of producing the right amount of DMS too, or explain how they can deliver it to an atmosphere. Again, for a hypothetical 5 sigma watertight detection.
- The asteroid Bennu, which NASA brought back samples from to Earth in 2023, is baffling scientists with its abundance of nitrogen and odd magnetic properties. www.newscientist.com/article/2471...
- A computer contained in a thin thread of stitchable fabric could be used to record, and understand, all sorts of information about the body that devices like Apple watches can't. And it's being tested on Canadian and US soldiers right now, in the Arctic. www.newscientist.com/article/2470...
- 50 years after it was first dreamt up by Douglas Hofstadter, this fascinating fractal butterfly has been found in a real physical system (in graphene, no less)! It's butterflies all the way down 🦋 www.newscientist.com/article/2470...
- Another moon launch tomorrow, including: 🌑 The southern-most point ever visited 🌑 A hopping robot entering a crater w/ permanent shadows (for the 1st time) 🌑 An asteroid mining mission 🌑 A rover with a tiny cute ant-sized rover on its back www.newscientist.com/article/2469...
- A lucky bit of timing meant astronomers could witness a thunderstorm on Jupiter in exquisite detail, as NASA's Juno spacecraft floated directly overhead 🛰️ www.newscientist.com/article/2469...
- Good news: asteroid 2024 YR4, which was on a collision course for Earth, will probably miss us. But that doesn't mean scientists aren't still considering a space mission to study it up close! (The chance of a moon impact has also quadrupled, at 1.2%) www.newscientist.com/article/2469...
- Microsoft researchers have shown off a new AI tool that can produce full-length, physically accurate gameplay sequences for Bleeding Edge, a multiplayer online battle game 🎮 Could this lead to fully AI-designed games? Probably not anytime soon. www.newscientist.com/article/2469...
- When the first exoplanets were discovered 30 years ago, we had only the faintest idea of what they looked like. Fast forward to today, and we have mindboggling detail - 3D atmospheres, actual wind speeds (70,000 km/h!) and altitude-dependent elements! www.newscientist.com/article/2468...
- The asteroid barreling towards Earth (maybe) has just got an even higher risk rating from NASA - it's now at a 1-in-38 chance, the highest odds yet of collision. Not worth worrying (yet), but the world's space agencies are keeping a *very* close eye. www.newscientist.com/article/2468...
- Jonathan McDowell has painstakingly amassed one of the world's largest collections on the space industry 🚀 @planet4589.bsky.social is now retiring, after four decades, and considering the future of his collection. We spoke all things space for @newscientist www.newscientist.com/article/2468...
- If this planet's atmosphere really is as packed full of sulphur as it looks, then it is probably *brimming* with volcanoes 🌋 Volcanoes as far as the eye can see, magma ocean just below nearly the whole planet, eggy-smelling air - hell, basically. www.newscientist.com/article/2467...
- See this circle with four blotches of white? It's light from a galaxy, 6 billion light years away, warped by a 2nd galaxy close to us. Astronomers have known about the close-by galaxy since 1886, and Einstein himself could have seen it if he'd had a good enough telescope 🔭
- But thanks to Euclid, a new powerful space telescope scanning over a third of the night sky, we can see it. “It’s like someone with bad eyesight putting their glasses on,” one researcher told me. Read the full article, and see the full picture, here: www.newscientist.com/article/2467...
- The new largest thing in the universe is mind-bogglingly large 🫨 Quipu is a structure of nearly 70 galactic superclusters and, in total, is more than 100,000 times as massive than a galaxy like our Milky Way. (1.4 billion light years across!) www.newscientist.com/article/2467...
- This robotic hand is almost as dexterous as a human hand, but half as heavy 👋 The hand, which is voice-controlled, can tie knots, comb hair and play chess, thanks to a clever system of heat-sensitive metal strips that function like human tendons. www.newscientist.com/article/2467...
- There is now a 1-in-43 chance that asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit Earth in 2032. It could be as wide as 100-metres, and would cause serious damage if it collides in populated areas. How worried should we be? My analysis for @newscientist www.newscientist.com/article/2467...
- If you want to cook a perfect boiled egg, then set aside 30 minutes and grab yourself two pans. That's according to new research from Italian food physicists who say that they have found a foolproof (but admittedly time-consuming) method for egg cooking. www.newscientist.com/article/2467...
- A mysterious kind of superconductivity found in a twisted crystal could eventually help us build room-temperature superconductors. But first, we need to figure out what's going on inside it. www.newscientist.com/article/2465...
- Human urine contains lots of tasty nutrients (for plants), but it's difficult to separate them out into useable fertiliser. A new method from Chinese researchers shows that we might be able to more easily extract fertiliser from wastewater. www.newscientist.com/article/2464...
- The winds on this alien planet are blisteringly fast 🌬️ WASP-127b, a puffball planet 500 lightyears from Earth, has circulating winds of 33,000 km/h, or nearly 30 times the speed of sound on Earth. That's the fastest planetary winds we know of. www.newscientist.com/article/2464...
- Two strange clouds of ice and dust floating in space have baffled researchers, who say they don't match any known object in space ❄️ We could be witnessing an entirely new kind of star, but there's still much more to figure out. www.newscientist.com/article/2464...
- Tiny insect-sized pollinating robots, hopping from plant to plant, are a little bit closer to reality with these nimble machines. The size of a stamp and the weight of a grain of rice, they're capable of some extraordinary aerial manoeuvres www.newscientist.com/article/2464...
- SpaceX vs. Blue Origin. Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos. Two very different rockets and space companies, but competitors all the same 🚀 What does this week's launches mean for the future of the space industry? It's not straightforward. www.newscientist.com/article/2464...
- Amazingly, having a robot hand move your fingers very fast can make you play piano even faster than you can through practice, even for expert pianists! 🎹 www.newscientist.com/article/2464...
- Ever wanted to dance with a robot? 💃 It's now a little bit easier, thanks to some great work from researchers at MIT that uses a motion capture database to help robots mimic human movements.
- Read the story here: www.newscientist.com/article/2464...
- Tomorrow's SpaceX launch kicks off what will be an incredibly busy year for spacecraft heading to the moon, with a dozen spacecraft teams having their sights set on lunar glory in 2025 🌑 www.newscientist.com/article/2463...
- We can now measure long distances with truly mindboggling precision. Take this work, by Jian-Wei Pan and colleagues, which uses lasers to measure more than 100 kilometres to within a thousandth of the width of a human hair 🤯 www.newscientist.com/article/2463...
- Strange rhythmic X-ray signals emanating from a supermassive black hole appear to be getting faster 🕳️ It's not clear exactly why, but one explanation could be a white dwarf orbiting perilously close to the black hole's event horizon. www.newscientist.com/article/2463...
- If you're lucky, you might be able to see the brightest comet in 20 years next week ☄️ Or it might fly too close to the sun and be invisible, if you're unlucky. www.newscientist.com/article/2463...
- What's the secret to a scientifically perfect cacio-e-pepe? 🍜 These Italian researchers spent months investigating, and found this seemingly simple dish is extremely physically complex. But to start, you'd do well to make sure you have enough starch. www.newscientist.com/article/2463...
