SCIENCE

A spectacular high-pressure water eruption at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas has captured widespread attention online, with videos of the massive "water blast" racking up millions of views as the company prepares for its 12th Starship test flight.

A senior NASA planetary defense official warned that humanity remains vulnerable to thousands of undetected near-Earth asteroids capable of devastating entire cities, emphasizing that current detection efforts have cataloged only about 40% of potentially hazardous objects in the 140-meter (460-foot) size range and that no ready-to-deploy deflection system exists for an imminent threat.

Bonobos, humanity's playful and peace-loving closest living relatives, are capable of genuine pretend play — the first time this sophisticated cognitive behavior has been reliably documented in a non-human great ape species outside of humans and, to a lesser degree, orangutans.

Australian scientists have unveiled a theoretical breakthrough that could dramatically accelerate the development of practical quantum computers, proposing the use of tiny "quantum batteries" to power the systems and potentially quadruple the number of qubits packed into the same physical space.