Science

Two groups both reported successfully teleporting state information across metro-scale fibre networks. A Chinese team is claiming a teleportation over a 30 km fibre in Haifei (the entanglement travelled nearly 16 km), while the University of Calgary used that city’s fibre network to carry entanglement 6.2 km. The ability to achieve quantum teleportation is an important benchmark for quantum-optical networks …

Researchers at the University of Alberta have precisely dated the world’s oldest rock unit at 4.02 billion years old. The ancient rock’s composition is different than scientists expected, suggesting the planet’s earliest continental crust was oceanic in structure and composition. “It gives us important information about how the early continents formed,” says lead author Jesse Reimink. “Because it’s so far …

A Shocking Number of Canadians Don’t Get Climate Change, Vaccines or GMOs. A new survey from the Ontario Science Centre shows that although most Canadians are confident in their grasp of key scientific issues, there are significant gaps in their actual understanding of the science behind them. The survey, conducted by Leger, asked Canadians about their scientific knowledge of climate …

Scientists have made the first expedition to Cook seamount, a 13,000-foot (3960m) extinct volcano at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. The scientists spotted a rare kind of octopus with big fins that look like an elephant’s ears and a possibly new type of violet-colored coral they dubbed Purple Haze. Conservation International, which …

A grim new study led by a UCLA geography professor revealed that the current 5-year drought in California could last indefinitely, with the resulting arid conditions becoming “the new normal” for the state. In the study, researchers looked at how climate contributed to drought and periods of dryness in California, stretching back 10,000 years into prehistoric times. They dug up …

NASA Flight Engineer Kate Rubins talked to cancer kid patients at the MD Anderson Cancer Center today about space, what does it take to become an astronaut and working hard to pursue one’s dreams. Rubins, still aboard the International Space Station as part of Expedition 49, took questions from NASA’s Johnson Space Center via video link. When asked when she …

An arctic research mission claims that it’s discovered the HMS Terror, one of two Franklin Expedition ships that sunk during a doomed attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage. The HMS Terror was a bomb vessel constructed for the British Royal Navy in 1813, fighting against the United States in the War of 1812 (yes, the war of 1812 lasted until …

A dozen polar bears fell upon five Russian researchers for two weeks in an Arctic weather station before rescue arrived Wednesday. For two weeks, polar bears have encircled the the Troynoy Island weather station, located in the Kara Sea north of Siberia, trapping five scientists inside. The Russian news agency TASS initially reported that supplies would not arrive for another …

A large sea creatures face a much higher extinction rate than their smaller brethren, scientists have learned. “There are a lot of reasons to think that what we’re seeing in the modern ocean is a distinctive signature of human activities, rather than the environmental changes that we’re also inducing,” says Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and lead author …

Take it all in: This is one of the best views of our Milky Way galaxy ever created, with more than a billion stars and celestial objects contained in a single image from European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The Gaia space probe aims to capture over a billion stars, distant galaxies and quasars to produce the largest and most detailed …

Scientists found signs of a growing planet around TW Hydra, a nearby young star, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Based on the distance from the central star and the distribution of tiny dust grains, the baby planet is thought to be an icy giant, similar to Uranus and Neptune in our Solar System. This result is another step …