Ecology

Why it is important to observe the Earth from space: interview with the head of ESA terrestrial monitoring

Why it is important to observe the Earth from space: interview with the head of ESA terrestrial monitoring

Credit: ESA/ATG medialab Space activities are not just observing space, but also observe the Earth from space. Terrestrial monitoring has a wide range of applications ranging from environmental and climate issues to geopolitical and military ones. On the occasion of the 2025 Ministerial Council of the European space agency we had the opportunity to talk about it with Simonetta Cheliresponsible ...

Airbus stops 6000 A320 planes due to a control software defect linked to solar storms

Airbus stops 6000 A320 planes due to a control software defect linked to solar storms

An American Airlines Airbus A320. Credit: Acroterio, CC BY–SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Airbusthe world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, required an urgent software update for approx 6,000 planes of the family A320 globally. This is the most impressive recall in the history of the French company, founded in 1970. The decision preventative it was taken following an accident on a flight ...

Gemini AI arrives on Google Maps: what it does and how to activate it during navigation

Gemini AI arrives on Google Maps: what it does and how to activate it during navigation

New Google Maps interface with Gemini integrated. Credit: Google. The integration of Gemini’s generative artificial intelligence within Google Maps navigation services is happening these days. The Mountain View giant, in fact, has started deploying Gemini within Google Mapsoperation that progressively replaces the previous Google Assistant with an advanced linguistic model, capable of interpreting complex requests and providing proactive assistance. This ...

From Graham's number to the Googlelplex, the largest known numbers ever "invented"

From Graham’s number to the Googlelplex, the largest known numbers ever “invented”

Which is the largest number in the world? As we know, this is a question that actually doesn’t make much sense, given that if there were a number larger than all of them, we could always overcome it by adding 1. However, there are some large numbers that compete for the title of the largest number ever “invented”, that is, ...

How do algorithms decide what to recommend to us and know what we like

How do algorithms decide what to recommend to us and know what we like

We are constantly surrounded by digital suggestions: every time we access a streaming platform or visit a e-commercesome algorithm based onartificial intelligence is working for us to curate the selection of content we find in front of us, be it digital content, products to purchase, and so on. This system, technically defined recommendation engineis based on the analysis of big ...

We unboxed Geopop games, which make science fun for everyone

We unboxed Geopop games, which make science fun for everyone

Geopop was born with a simple idea: make science pop, fun, accessible and understandable for everyone, without age or skill barriers. The best way to learn science is by having fun, and it is precisely for this reason that we came to collaborate with Clementoniwhich has always been a symbol of educational games: together we have transformed our contents into ...

Italy in space: interview with Minister Adolfo Urso at the ESA Ministerial

Italy in space: interview with Minister Adolfo Urso at the ESA Ministerial

Al Ministerial Council ESA 2025 in Bremen, Germany, a budget of 22.1 billion euros to the European Space Agency for the next few years, divided between the various member countries and some allied countries. The Ministerial marks the beginning of a three-year period under Italian leadership of ESA, which will end with the next Council in our country in 2028. ...

How to understand when land turtles hibernate: how it works and what to do

How to understand when land turtles hibernate: how it works and what to do

Who has one turtle in the garden, he hasn’t seen her around for some time because in the month of November she went in hibernationor almost. With the arrival of the winter season in our latitudes not only turtles, but in general all reptiles they undergo a particular form of quiescence and metabolic slowdown brumation. It is a process similar ...

The Burtele Foot was a new species of australopithecine, an ancient "relative" of Lucy: what the discovery reveals

The Burtele Foot was a new species of australopithecine, an ancient “relative” of Lucy: what the discovery reveals

On the site of Woranso-Millein Ethiopiagods came to light fossil remains associated with some kind of Australopithecus. The Ethiopian researcher who studied them, the paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassiehe immediately realized that these bones, or part of a foot (known as Burtele’s foot), some teethand one jaw infantile, presented characteristics different from those of Australopithecus afarensisthe species to which the famous one ...