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Elles n'étaient pas censées exister, et pourtant des astronomes ont décelé des étoiles vertes dans l'univers. Dans les environs de Clermont-Ferrand, un tremblement de terre a été ressenti dans la nuit du 22 octobre. Et dans quelques semaines, SpaceX va s'essayer à une voltige particulière avec le Starship.
Elles n'étaient pas censées exister, et pourtant des astronomes ont décelé des étoiles vertes dans l'univers. Dans les environs de Clermont-Ferrand, un tremblement de terre a été ressenti dans la nuit du 22 octobre. Et dans quelques semaines, SpaceX va s'essayer à une voltige particulière avec le Starship.
Chaque matériau a un seuil de résistance mécanique maximal qui lui est propre. Au-delà d’une certaine pression, il va se déformer. De manière surprenante, ces seuils changent radicalement lorsque l’on passe de notre échelle macroscopique à des tailles nanométriques. Comment expliquer, physiquement, ce changement ?
Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear again. The wispy formation appears near the volcano Arsia Mons and gradually elongates until it reaches over 1,000 miles—about the distance from New York to Kansas City as the crow flies—before dissipating. This cycle then repeats for several months.
Since it was first recorded by a probe in 2018, scientists have been unable to find a plausible explanation for the existence of this cloud, often referred to as the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC). Until now. Recently, researchers successfully modeled the cloud’s formation for the first time, their results suggesting that it may be driven by a physical process that has never been directly observed in any planet's atmosphere.
"We found that we needed to include some exotic physics… physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature. It certainly hasn’t been seen in action before," Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at Paris’ Sorbonne Université and lead author of the study, said in a press release. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped.”
Barnes Ice Cap sits on the central plateau of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic. It is the last surviving fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, which at its peak buried most of Canada under two miles of ice and locked away around 80 meters of sea level. That remnant has now yielded direct physical evidence that ice sheets might have reversed their retreat and started to grow again thousands of years ago.
In a recent Science study, researchers show that the Laurentide reached its smallest size about 3,600 years ago, then started re-expanding roughly 2,000 years ago, which the team interprets as the opening move of the next glaciation. Apparently, this brand-new ice age was on its way until about 1960, when human-caused climate warming reversed it.
“Barnes is the last remaining piece of one of the domes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet,” says Nicolás Young, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study. As that enormous dome thinned through the Holocene, its margin withdrew up onto Baffin Island, and what's left today is the deflated core of something that was once two miles thick. The reason Barnes can testify about its own history, Young explains, comes down to the temperature at its base.
Marvel Studios a diffusé un spot d'environ une minute d'Avengers : Doomsday pendant le premier match des World Series de baseball, ce vendredi 23 octobre aux États-Unis. On y voit les Quatre Fantastiques dans un stade, et Ant-Man qui appelle le mauvais Captain America.
Pas de fioritures, pas de consensus mou, pas de place pour le tiède : quand le mois d'octobre touche à sa fin, le catalogue Netflix se transforme en un champ de mines psychologiques pour amateurs de frissons bruts et de cauchemars indélébiles. Du cauchemar gothique à la science-fiction temporelle, voici le top horreur des séries Netflix.
Leaders in the US Space Force would like to have a new spaceport up and running in four years, adding a third heavy-lift launch site to relieve pressure from bases in Florida and California that have shot rockets into orbit for nearly 70 years.
The obvious problem with that ambition is 2030 is four years away, and Pentagon officials have not determined where the new spaceport should go or how to acquire land for it.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink first mentioned the service's search for a third launch base in May. A congressionally mandated study of the Space Force's launch infrastructure identified the need for "another site that's capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability," Meink said in a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
Much of what we know about how a brain makes decisions comes from studying monkeys watching dots. In a task known as a random-dot-motion task, a cloud of flickering specks drifts weakly in one direction while the subject tries to determine whether—and in which direction— it’s moving. The task has shown that in the primate neocortex, neurons gather visual evidence over time, with their firing rates climbing until they cross a threshold, when the animal commits to a decision.
But avian brains don’t have a neocortex, so it wasn’t obvious how they made similar decisions.
“This was the big question,” said Andreas Nieder, a neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen. “How [would] a differently organized avian brain encode decisions?”
Avec des vents soutenus proches de 300 km/h à son pic, le typhon Champi est la tempête la plus violente de l'année. Il longe ce vendredi 23 octobre les côtes de Taïwan et devrait ensuite atteindre la Chine et le Japon.
A 25-year-old German experimental photographer has won the 2026 Nikon Small World photomicrography competition with a striking image of droplets of ink being deposited on paper by an inkjet printer. Ole Bielfeldt beat out 1,802 other entries hailing from 69 different countries.
Bielfeldt became interested in photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown after discovering an old microscope in his parents' attic. He figured out how to build an adaptor out of a tube and some wood to connect the microscope to his father's camera and taught himself the art through trial and error, building custom tools as needed. He documents how he captures transformative images of everyday objects with behind-the-scenes videos posted to macrofying, his photography and videography brand.
It was Bielfeldt's curiosity about the inner workings of inkjet printers that inspired his winning entry, but capturing the action of ink drops being deposited on paper was a challenge, given that the process happens so quickly. The droplets, for instance, moved faster than the camera's shutter speed. Bielfeldt's solution was to deconstruct the printer so that the paper moved under a stationary (rather than moving) printhead, and then take the image in a dark room, using a flash to serve as the shutter, thereby freezing the ink drops mid-air. There was no need for pricey equipment. Bielfeldt does not use AI in his images, preferring to rely on traditional techniques.
OpenAI used nearly 2,000 AI agents to analyze mouse brain-cell data in 32 minutes, uncovering possible links to neurological diseases for further study.
The post OpenAI Ran Nearly 2,000 AI Agents on Brain Data: What They Found in 32 Minutes appeared first on TechRepublic.
Alerte étoiles filantes : dans la nuit du 21 au 22 octobre 2026, un essaim d'étoiles filantes est à son pic d'activité. Il s'agit des Orionides, qui proviennent de la comète de Halley. Comment faire pour observer cette pluie de météores ?
Une comète jamais vue auparavant a été découverte par le télescope Euclid. Une première pour ce satellite européen, dont la mission principale est de traquer la matière noire dans l'Univers lointain.
Around the world, governments are grappling with the same question: how do you prepare young people for careers shaped by emerging technologies? In the UK, part of the answer is TechFirst, and we’re proud to be playing a central role in it.
Through the new TechFirst partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), we are expanding Ada Computer Science, the free computing education platform we have built with the University of Cambridge for UK students and teachers. It’s one of the ways the UK government plans to bring frontier tech education to a million secondary students (11- to 18-year-olds) over the next three years.
TechFirst is the UK government’s £187 million tech skills initiative, designed to open up pathways into the country’s tech sector. It supports people at every stage, from students in school to university researchers and career changers.
Backed by major tech employers, the programme focuses on six frontier technologies: cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, engineering biology, semiconductors, and advanced connectivity technologies.
Ada Computer Science sits at the heart of TechFirst’s schools strand. With DCMS funding, we’re adding new content and features to the platform, and everything stays completely free.
For the first time, Ada Computer Science now covers ages 11 to 19, with new teaching and learning materials for 11- to 14-year-olds added alongside everything we already offer for ages 14 to 19. Thanks to the new materials, students can start exploring computing and frontier technologies earlier, and build on that learning all the way through to the end of secondary education.
Alongside the expansion of the Ada CS platform, DCMS is funding Regional Delivery Partners to bring hands-on technology activities into secondary schools across the UK, giving students practical experience and a real sense of where a tech career could take them.
Beyond the economic opportunities that understanding frontier technologies opens up for young people, gaining this knowledge and skills helps young people have agency and power in a world where technology plays an ever greater role in their lives.
We are pleased to offer the new frontier technologies materials, like all our teaching and learning resources, at no cost to teachers and students. This is one way in which we support equal access to a high-quality computing and AI education for all young people.
We will add new content and features to Ada CS in phases, including:
If you’re a teacher or student in the UK, you can explore the first TechFirst content release on the Ada Computer Science website. Create a free account to be first to hear about the new content and features.
The post Preparing young people for frontier technologies: Our new partnership with the UK government appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Running complicated algorithms on quantum computing hardware is going to require the use of logical qubits, where collections of hardware qubits are linked together in ways that allow errors to be detected and corrected. In general, the more hardware qubits you dedicate to each logical qubit, the better the chances are of identifying errors. But, given that the hardware qubits are prone to errors, adding more of them also increases the probability that errors will occur. If the hardware error rate is too high, then growing the logical qubit will only make matters worse.
Fortunately, several companies have demonstrated hardware where the error rate is not too high. Several demonstrations show logical qubits are beyond the breakeven point, where adding more qubits improves performance. The problem is that the improvement isn't very dramatic. To lower error rates to levels we'll need to run complex algorithms, we'd have to add a completely impractical number of qubits to each logical qubit.
On Monday, Quantinuum announced that its current generation of hardware is capable of scaling well beyond the breakeven point. Each step up in the size of logical qubits improved some measures of their performance by a factor of over 10.
La Nasa surveille étroitement l'évolution du phénomène El Niño depuis l'espace. Les données des satellites montrent des changements déjà nets dans le Pacifique : une eau plus chaude, un niveau de la mer plus haut et un océan plus bleu.
Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth, a daring international project that could yield new insights into the formation of the Solar System.
The robotic Martian Moons eXploration mission, known as MMX, lifted off at 3:41 pm EDT Monday (4:41 am Japan Standard Time Tuesday) from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.
The MMX spacecraft rode into orbit atop a 207-foot-tall (63-meter) H3 rocket, Japan's flagship launch vehicle. The rocket assigned to MMX debuted a new souped-up configuration with four strap-on solid rocket boosters, full-throttle main engines, and an extended payload shroud to accommodate the demands of Japan's heaviest and most ambitious interplanetary mission to date.
A Russian military satellite maneuvered in "extreme proximity" of a commercial Earth-imaging satellite in recent days in the first known example an unsanctioned rendezvous in low-Earth orbit, according to orbital intelligence company LeoLabs.
The Russian spacecraft, Kosmos 2612, "conducted a deliberate series of maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a US-operated commercial imaging satellite," LeoLabs said. "Kosmos 2612 closed from hundreds of kilometers away to extreme proximity to ICEYE-X36. It then maneuvered around ICEYE-X36, remained nearby for an extended period, and then began moving away."
US military officials and independent analysts have tracked Kosmos 2612 since its April launch on a Soyuz rocket from a spaceport in northern Russia. Within weeks, it became apparent that at least four of the six satellites from that launch were stalking ICEYE-X36 after they adjusted orbits to line up with the orbit of the ICEYE spacecraft.
The first order of business for the energy transition is electrifying applications like vehicles and heating and making sure that the electricity that powers them is made using renewables. But once the dominant slices of the emissions pie have shrunk, other categories with less potential to reduce emissions become important.
A new study led by Haiwei Zhou at the University of Melbourne focused on the emissions associated with making lithium-ion batteries, which many parts of the energy transition rely on. Those emissions aren’t zero, so as we use more and more batteries, that number will grow. Right now, the researchers estimate that these emissions only account for 0.18 percent of annual greenhouse gas releases, but they could increase by a factor of 10 or more by 2050.
There are a number of ways to reduce the emissions required to make a battery. Some elements used in various lithium-ion battery chemistries are more energy-intensive to mine and refine than others. The battery manufacturing process involves many steps that could be made more energy-efficient. And then there’s recycling, which can put battery materials back into the loop while requiring much less energy than mining.
The world’s first demonstration of a subsea geothermal power plant has taken place near an active underwater volcano almost a mile below the ocean surface. It generated less than 10 seconds of net-positive electricity but showed the technical feasibility of tapping another form of renewable energy underwater.
The three-week test deployment of the 3-ton prototype power plant took place at the Axial Seamount in the northeast Pacific Ocean in September. Endurance Energy, the Seattle-based startup behind the effort, aims to eventually commercialize subsea geothermal power for Pacific island nations and other customers looking for alternatives to importing expensive fossil fuels.
“The deep ocean gives us unlimited cold seawater for cooling, and its weight keeps the system and the well pressurized, so our plants can be compact,” said Andrew Redd, founder and CEO of Endurance Energy, in an email to Ars.
La mission MMX qui contient un petit rover Idéfix doit se rendre jusqu'à Phobos, la lune de Mars, pour en ramener quelques grammes d'échantillons. Un projet inédit et ambitieux dont le départ est à suivre en direct ce lundi 19 octobre au soir.
La mission MMX qui contient un petit rover Idéfix doit se rendre jusqu'à Phobos, la lune de Mars, pour en ramener quelques grammes d'échantillons. Un projet inédit et ambitieux dont le départ est à suivre en direct ce lundi 19 octobre au soir.
La mission spatiale japonaise Martian Moons eXploration doit décoller ce soir du Japon en direction de deux satellites de Mars : Phobos et Déimos. Elle doit déposer sur le premier le rover Idefix développé notamment par le CNES.
L’agence spatiale japonaise Jaxa s’apprête à lancer, ce soir et depuis l’île de Tanegashima (Japon) sa mission MMX (Martian Moons Exploration) à bord d’une fusée H3. Celle-ci a pour but de connaitre un peu mieux la planète rouge en allant observer ses deux satellites que sont Phobos et Déimos. Et même de rapporter des échantillons provenant du premier !
Si elle réussit, ça sera la première mission scientifique à rapporter des échantillons venant de Mars. Rappelons que les États-Unis ont décidé, en début d’année, d’abandonner les échantillons recueillis sur Mars par le rover Perseverance : la mission Mars Sample Return a été tout bonnement annulée.
Concernant MMX, l’avenir du projet reste au beau fixe. La JAXA propose de suivre le lancement ce soir sur sa chaine YouTube. Comme nous l’expliquions déjà il y a 9 ans, l’idée principale est donc de faire un aller-retour vers Mars avec une escale sur Phobos.
Comme le souligne le Journal du CNRS, l’idée d’aller explorer Phobos s’explique aussi parce que l’origine des deux satellites de Mars reste mystérieuse : « Il y a deux théories, résume Patrick Michel, astrophysicien et directeur de recherche CNRS à l’Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur. Phobos et Déimos ressemblent à des astéroïdes, et auraient ainsi pu être capturés par la force d’attraction gravitationnelle de Mars. Mais leur trajectoire paraît bien étrange. Il pourrait donc s’agir du résultat d’un impact géant, mais ce n’est pas ce que nous montrent les observations sur sa composition pour l’instant. »
L’agence spatiale japonaise prévoit d’abord un voyage d’une année pour arriver aux alentours de Mars. Sa sonde amène avec elle neuf instruments, dont le spectromètre à neutrons et rayons gamma baptisé MEGANE développé par la NASA et MIRS, un spectromètre imageur infrarouge développé par le Laboratoire d’Etudes Spatiales et d’Instrumentation en Astrophysique (LESIA) en partenariat avec le CNES. MIRS doit « permettre de caractériser la composition minéralogique de la surface des lunes de Mars et l’analyse de l’atmosphère martienne. Il va permettre de participer à la sélection des sites d’atterrissage de MMX », explique le CNES.
Car l’idée est ensuite de récupérer des informations sur Phobos pour connaître sa topologie et chercher des dizaines de sites d’atterrissage potentiels pour déterminer le meilleur endroit pour s’y poser.
Ensuite, la mission doit envoyer son rover pour observer la surface du satellite de Mars. Ce rover s’appelle Idefix. Il a été développé par le CNES en collaboration avec le Centre allemand pour l’aéronautique et l’astronautique (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR). Si vous voulez vous amuser à en imprimer une copie, le CNES a même partagé les plans.
Si tout va bien, Idefix pourra ensuite donner des indications à la sonde principale de la mission pour qu’elle puisse à son tour atterrir sur Phobos. Elle y collectera 10 g d’échantillons pour qu’ils soient analysés plus tard sur Terre. Après quelques observations supplémentaires sur Phobos, MMX passera par le deuxième satellite de Mars, Deimos, pour l’observer aussi, puis repartira des environs de Mars en 2030. La JAXA espère récupérer tout ce beau monde en 2031.
About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest.
The rocket's flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.
The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.
Le Snyderverse n'en finit pas de sortir ses cadavres du placard. Alors que la saga du Chevalier Noir sous l'ère Matt Reeves et Robert Pattinson traverse des turbulences, un autre Batman refait surface. Celui de Ben Affleck.
La NASA a présenté début octobre 2026, au Congrès international d'astronautique, le calendrier détaillé que SpaceX doit suivre pour poser des astronautes sur la Lune avec Starship. Il prévoit un atterrissage lunaire sans équipage fin 2027, quelques mois avant la première mission habitée.
Après la baisse des budgets de la recherche en France, la Cour des comptes plaide pour une baisse du nombre d’unités mixtes de recherche (UMR), ces laboratoires dans lesquels organismes de recherche et universités mettent des moyens en commun au service d’un même projet scientifique. Au risque de raviver la colère dans le milieu contre ce que l’ancien PDG du CNRS avait appelé les « key labs ».
La Cour des comptes acte que les gouvernements successifs français n’ont pas augmenté le budget de la recherche en France (public et privé) de manière à ce qu’il atteigne l’objectif longtemps planifié de 3 % de PIB. Dans un rapport sur les unités mixtes de recherche (UMR), la juridiction administrative en profite pour remettre sur l’établi le projet des « key labs » que le gouvernement et le PDG du CNRS de l’époque, Antoine Petit, avaient abandonné début 2025 après le mouvement de défiance qu’il avait suscité au sein de l’organisme.
La juridiction administrative, dirigée depuis février par l’ancienne ministre de l’Action et des Comptes publics Amélie de Montchalin, a publié récemment un rapport [PDF] sur les unités mixtes de recherche (UMR), une organisation « sans équivalent au monde » mise en place en France dans les années 1960 pour créer des laboratoires communs entre universités et organismes de recherche comme le CNRS (l’organisme qui y est de fait le plus impliqué), l’Inria, l’Inserm ou encore le CNES, par exemple.
La Cour des comptes y constate que la France « ne consacre que 2,18 % [chiffre 2023] de son PIB à la recherche, alors que six États de l’Union européenne, dont l’Allemagne, atteignent l’objectif de 3 % fixé dans le cadre de la stratégie de Lisbonne ».
De retour après quasiment 8 mois dans l'espace, Sophie Adenot renoue avec des sensations bien terrestres. L'astronaute française redécouvre notamment les odeurs, après avoir connu celles de l'ISS. Elles se font plus rares, mais n'en sont pas moins étonnantes... comme l'odeur de brûlé qui marque la fin d'une sortie extravéhiculaire !
Nos horloges atomiques sont plus régulières que la rotation de la Terre : depuis 1972, il a fallu leur ajouter 27 secondes pour suivre l’irrégularité de la rotation terrestre. Ces secondes supplémentaires peuvent provoquer des bugs ou des pannes informatiques. Le projet de réforme à l’étude ce mois-ci autoriserait un décalage d’une heure entre nos horloges et la rotation terrestre. S'il faudrait plusieurs siècles pour atteindre cet écart, certains utilisateurs devraient suivre la dérive entre le temps astronomique et le temps des horloges plus précisément.
Close to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings. Planning for and spearheading meetings eats up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.
Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible? For decades, the answer was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists. The field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. And it is providing a fascinating window into human behavior.
Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to get something done, share ideas, get on the same page, or just to remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” says organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.
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