ESA's Planetary Defence team The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved the naming of ten asteroids – and one comet – after people and places linked to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) efforts to protect…
XMM-Newton’s 20th anniversary in space
ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory is celebrating its 20th launch anniversary. In those two decades, the observatory has supplied a constant stream of outstanding science. One area that the mission has excelled in is the science of…
Social influencers: what can we learn from animals?
Research from Oxford University calls us to reconsider how behaviours may spread through societies of wild animals, and how this might provide new insights into human social networks. Our social connections to one another, whether…
Helping machines perceive some laws of physics
Model registers “surprise” when objects in a scene do something unexpected, which could be used to build smarter AI. Humans have an early understanding of the laws of physical reality. Infants, for instance, hold expectations…
The Eurasian Continent remembers and amplifies cold waves…
Cold waves triggered by sea ice loss in the Arctic are memorized in the Eurasian Continent, amplifying cooling in the winters to follow, according to a joint research team between Hokkaido University and Niigata University…