Environment No, trees can't anticipate a solar eclipse Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In April 2025, a scientific study went viral online for a particularly wild claim. A forest of Norway spruce trees () in the Dolomites of northern Italy appeared to rapidly synchronize their cellular-level electrical signals--known as electromes--in the hours leading up to a partial solar eclipse in October 2022 . If true, the discovery by the Italian Institute of Technology represented a possibly major development in understanding how plants communicate with one another. Despite many critics' skepticism, headlines describing a " forest-wide phenomenon " of talking trees spread quickly across the internet.

The Longest Solar Eclipse for 100 Years Is Coming. NASA has announced when the longest total solar eclipse of the century will occur--and you won't have to wait long. Here's what you should know. The duration of a total solar eclipse always varies. In April 2024, the eclipse that crossed North America lasted 4 minutes and 28 seconds.

We introduce Open Deep Search (ODS) to close the increasing gap between the proprietary search AI solutions, such as Perplexity's Sonar Reasoning Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o Search Preview, and their open-source counterparts. The main innovation introduced in ODS is to augment the reasoning capabilities of the latest open-source LLMs with reasoning agents that can judiciously use web search tools to answer queries. Concretely, ODS consists of two components that work with a base LLM chosen by the user: Open Search Tool and Open Reasoning Agent. Open Reasoning Agent interprets the given task and completes it by orchestrating a sequence of actions that includes calling tools, one of which is the Open Search Tool. Open Search Tool is a novel web search tool that outperforms proprietary counterparts. Together with powerful open-source reasoning LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1, ODS nearly matches and sometimes surpasses the existing state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks: SimpleQA and FRAMES. For example, on the FRAMES evaluation benchmark, ODS improves the best existing baseline of the recently released GPT-4o Search Preview by 9.7% in accuracy. ODS is a general framework for seamlessly augmenting any LLMs -- for example, DeepSeek-R1 that achieves 82.4% on SimpleQA and 30.1% on FRAMES -- with search and reasoning capabilities to achieve state-of-the-art performance: 88.3% on SimpleQA and 75.3% on FRAMES.

NASA's sun-observing spacecraft has captured colorful images of the moment the earth blocked its view of the sun. In a short animation posted on Tuesday, the Solar Dynamics Observatory's (SDO) view of a purple-colored sun is interrupted as Earth completely covers its surface. The sun isn't actually purple, but it looks that color because the images were taken in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light. This kind of ultraviolet light is a type that's usually invisible to the human eye, so NASA noted that it's been colorized in purple. Stunning footage from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captures when the earth completely covers its view of the sun.

I was able to see the solar eclipse this past August in Oregon (take a look at this person's amazing capture). Not only is the type and path of the one we saw rare (there hasn't been such a perfect solar eclipse in this country since 1918 -- and the next really good one won't be until 2045), how data is used to predict with precision when it will happen is really amazing. How wild is it that three men using data were able to determine the exact spot in Wyoming to get the best opportunity to photograph the International Space Station (ISS) transiting the Sun during the eclipse. They calculated the time that to a half a second to be correct about the ISS housing real people, transiting across the sun with a computer that fits in a normal pocket. Twenty years ago, people would've called it improbable.

I was 8-years-old and remember being both terrified and intrigued about something that was being talked about everywhere. This wasn't a storyline out of a science fiction movie or novel, this was real, and happening here on Earth. Millions of people were going to witness something that maybe happens a couple of times in our lifetime: A total solar eclipse. Our teachers were planning lessons about this incredible celestial event. Chalkboard diagrams, planetary mobiles and handmade viewing devices were being created out of shoe boxes.

On August 21, 2017, there's going to be a total eclipse of the Sun visible on a line across the US. But when exactly will the solar eclipse occur at a given location? Being able to predict astronomical events has historically been one of the great triumphs of exact science. But in 2017, how well can it actually be done? Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. The answer, I think, is well enough that even though the edge of totality moves at just over 1000 miles per hour it should be possible to predict when it will arrive at a given location to within perhaps a second. And as a demonstration of this, we've created a website to let anyone enter their geo location (or address) and then immediately compute when the eclipse will reach them--as well as generate many pages of other information. These days it's easy to find out when the next solar eclipse will be; indeed built right into the Wolfram Language there's ...

We'll take a look back at some of the big stories from earlier this week, plus key updates like NASA's tips for viewing a solar eclipse. Getting the weekend started early.DC security robot says everything is fine, throws itself into pool Don't read too much into this, but a security robot face-planted into an indoor fountain inside of a Washington, DC office building. Important information.NASA doesn't want you to go blind during the solar eclipse Please, for the love of god (and your eyesight), do not try to make your own eclipse glasses. Buy a pair, and make sure they're less than three years old with lenses that are in good shape. The much-celebrated full solar eclipse is just one month away for those in the continental United States, and NASA really does not want you to go blind when it finally happens.

How a group of off-road pioneers brought the sport of four-wheeling to Vietnam, and along the way became a disaster relief squad. Their fleet of competition-ready, off-roading Toyota Land Cruisers include FJs that span four decades. We go behind the (very busy) scenes /b p Wimbledon's 15,000-seat Centre Court is serene and empty except for the 24-hour security guards protecting the most hallowed patch of grass in world … Long before there were musical instruments, the human voice was used to make beautiful music. It's no surprise that the beauty of singing has been … A good rocket launch site has a few important characteristics. Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first.

A stunning new animation reveals the moment the moon crosses in front of the sun during a partial solar eclipse. The phenomenon was captured on May 25 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), during a lunar transit that lasted nearly an hour. During this time, scientists say the moon covered roughly 89 percent of the sun, revealing a'crisp' view of the lunar horizon. The phenomenon was captured on May 25 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), during a lunar transit that lasted nearly an hour. The animation reveals the moon's path as it crossed in front of the sun NASA has revealed a plan to send a robot to the sun in 2018 to help understand space weather. This will bring it seven times closer to the sun's surface than any spacecraft before it.