Chinese chipmakers expect to make next-generation smartphone processors as early as this year despite U.S. efforts to curb their development of advanced technologies, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the country's top chipmaker, has put together new semiconductor production lines in Shanghai to mass produce chips designed by Huawei, the report said, citing people familiar with the move.

SMIC is aiming to use its existing stock of U.S. and Dutch-made equipment to produce 5-nanometre chips, it added.

Huawei and SMIC did not immediately reply to Reuters' request for comment.

A team of psychologists were so sure "climate deniers" deceive themselves for selfish reasons that they ran three experiments with four thousand people, only to find they were completely wrong.

The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don't know their research topic at all, maybe?)

It must have been quite the shock when they were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn't enough.

Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results.

One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad. "We call this thought process 'motivated reasoning,'...

The only thing the study showed was the dire state of psychological science. For starters, researchers were oblivious to their own prejudice and incompetent background research. They can't define a climate change denier in any scientific sense, it's not a label of a group of homo-sapiens who think the climate never changes, it's just a petty kindergarten insult designed to fool, well,... psychologists. And it works. If they had spent five minutes reading skeptical web-sites they'd know that half the population have good reason to be skeptical of unaudited and unaccountable foreign committees which rely on broken models. In fact if they were looking for "motivated reasoning" in the climate debate (and they say they were) then most of it is on the believer side, where people might be motivated by billions of dollars in government grants.

Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer told people they could decide where a $20 donation went — they could choose which climate charity would get the cash, or they could keep it themselves. The "control" group weren't allowed to keep the cash themselves. Basically 41% to 44% of the crowd kept the money. But amazingly more than 50% still gave the cash to a climate charity. Humans are nice people, really. I mean, they could all have kept the cash, and most didn't. Presumably no one wants to look too scroogy in front of researchers, but some people know climate charities are pagan institutions designed to cheat money from the poor and give it to billionaires — so it's better to look like a scrooge than feed the machine.

At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end. "Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves," says Zimmermann, ... "One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change."

The beautiful thing about fractals, the self-repeating patterns found throughout nature, is their enchanting repetition which runs infinitely deep.

Zoom in on the branching found in objects like fern fronds and snowflakes and you'll see they repeat in miniature - sometimes all the way down to atomic and quantum matter.

Mesmerizing as they are, such geometric patterns can have their limits. According to a new study that has found forest canopies don't replicate the fractal patterns of individual trees.

The galaxy is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, and is harboring a powerful black hole that is responsible for forming new stars at a high rate.

NASA announced that their Hubble Space Telescope, which has been orbiting Earth for more than two decades, observed the spiral galaxy named ESO 420-G013 last week as part of a study of Luminous Infrared Galaxies (LIRGs). According to the administration, LIRGs are known to be extremely bright in the infrared part of the spectrum.

The galaxy ESO 420-G013 is exactly that: an extremely bright spiral galaxy, and it is harboring a powerful black hole. It is located 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Sculptor which can be found in the southern sky.

ESOS 402-G013 is classified as a Seyfert galaxy. These types of galaxies were named after American astronomer Carl Keenan Seyfert, who studied the objects in 1943. Seyfert galaxies, for which there are two types, have an extremely bright, point-like active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole, according to NASA.

New Delhi is experimenting with radioisotopes to charge its robotic missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond...

Indians are ecstatic over their space program's string of successes in recent months. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has a couple of well-kept tech secrets - one of them nuclear - that will drive future voyages to the cosmos.

In the Hollywood sci-fi movie 'The Martian', astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, is presumed dead and finds ways to stay alive on the red planet, mainly thanks to a big box of Plutonium known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG).

In the film, Watney uses it to travel in his rover to the 'Pathfinder', a robotic spacecraft which launched decades ago, to use its antenna to communicate with his NASA colleagues and tell them he's still alive. Additionally, the astronaut dips this box into a container of water to thaw it.

In real life, the RTG generates electricity from the heat of a decaying radioactive substance, in this case, Plutonium-238. This unique material emits steady heat due to its natural radioactive decay. Its continuous radiation of heat, often lasting decades, made it the material of choice for producing electrical power onboard several deep-space missions of the erstwhile USSR and the US.

Lake Rotorua, which sits at the heart of a dormant volcano and is the setting for one of New Zealand's most famous Māori love stories, has been mapped in detail for the 1st time. Comments (0)

New maps have revealed a hidden hydrothermal system beneath a legendary lake in New Zealand, which serves as the setting for a famous Māori love story.

Lake Rotorua sits at the heart of a massive ancient crater of a dormant volcano on New Zealand's North Island. The lake has a storied history: it is where the daughter of an influential chief is said to have overcome forbidden love by swimming across the lake to be with a young warrior.

Something unprecedented is happening in Earth orbit. In only a few short years, the satellite population has skyrocketed, more than doubling since 2020. In the past year alone, more satellites have been launched than during the first thirty years of the Space Age. Much of this activity is driven by SpaceX and its growing megaconstellation of Starlink internet satellites.

Environmentalists have raised many concerns about Starlink including light-pollution of the night sky, a potentially hazardous traffic jam in low-Earth orbit, and even ozone depletion. Copycat megaconstellations by other companies and countries will only multiply these concerns.

Now there's a new reason to worry. According to a new study by Sierra Solter, megaconstellations could alter and weaken Earth's magnetic field.

Solter is a graduate student at the University of Iceland, working on her PhD in plasma physics. She recently realized something overlooked by many senior colleagues: "More than 500,000 satellites are expected in decades ahead, primarily to build internet megaconstellations. Every satellite that goes up will eventually come down, disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere. This will create a massive layer of conducting, electrically charged particles around our planet."

To preserve a "livable planet," the Earth can't warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the United Nations warns.

Failure to maintain that level could lead to several catastrophes, including increased droughts and weather-related disasters, more heat-related illnesses and deaths, and less food and more poverty, according to NASA.

To avert the looming tribulations and limit global temperature increases, 194 member states and the European Union in 2016 signed the U.N. Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty with a goal to "substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions."

After the agreement, global spending on climate-related projects increased exponentially.

The rate of global greening caused by recent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide has accelerated during the last two decades, according to important new findings recently published by a group of Chinese scientists. About 55% of global land mass revealed an "accelerated rate" of vegetation growth, compared with only 7.3% showing increased decline or 'browning'. Global greening due to higher levels of CO₂ is an inconvenient fact that is often ignored in mainstream climate science. In fact there have even been attempts to suggest greening has slowed or reversed. Studies showing higher levels of global browning use sources that "should be used with caution", advise the authors of the new study.

It is known that the planet has been greening since at least 1980, with some estimates suggesting increased levels as high as 14%. In a detailed paper published in 2016 by 32 authors from eight countries, it was noted that there was a "persistent and widespread increase" in growing-season greening over 25-50% of the global vegetated area. Now the Chinese scientists, including Eco-Climatologist Professor Tiexi Chen, state that "global greening is an indisputable fact".

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unveiled detailed images of 19 Milky Way-like spiral galaxies, showcasing stars, gas, and dust with unprecedented precision. Described as extraordinary and mind-blowing by scientist Janice Lee, these images reveal the galaxies at the smallest scales ever observed beyond our own.

The stunning detail has captivated even seasoned researchers who have studied these galaxies for decades, marking a significant advancement in astronomical observation capabilities.

JWST Unveils Unprecedented Views of the Universe

JWST was launched on Christmas Day in 2021 and continues to stand out for its unparalleled ability to capture highly detailed images of distant objects in the universe.

Equipped with near- and mid-infrared cameras, the telescope can perceive light in the infrared spectrum, invisible to the human eye. This capability enables scientists to visualize dust clouds and objects concealed within them, including those too faint for traditional telescopes.