NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have once again helped make history for SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, by docking to a football field-size laboratory above Earth. After careening into space on Saturday atop a Falcon 9 rocket, the astronauts’ spaceship – a Crew Dragon capsule they later named “Endeavour” –
Month: May 2020
We know that global warming is forcing many animals around the world to flee their normal habitats, but now, an exhaustive analysis has shown marine species are booking it for the poles six times faster than those on land. Drawing together 258 peer-reviewed studies, researchers compared over 30,000 habitat shifts in more than 12,000
SpaceX launched its most precious cargo yet into space on Saturday: two NASA astronauts and a plush, sequined dinosaur toy. At 3:22 pm ET, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the Crew Dragon spaceship that SpaceX designed and NASA funded. It’s the first time a commercial spacecraft has carried humans into space,
While it probably won’t make it to your dining table, a new scientific achievement might be able to help in everything from radar equipment to electric cars: scientists have been able to form salt, aka sodium chloride (NaCl), in a hexagonal shape. This is work done at the smallest of scales, with researchers able to
SpaceX and NASA have successfully launched the first crewed mission into space from US soil in nine years. At 3:22 pm ET on 30 May 2020, SpaceX became the first private space company to deliver NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The two astronauts onboard the Crew Dragon are Bob Behnken and Doug
Updated: After the launch attempt on Wednesday had to be scrubbed due to weather, SpaceX and NASA have successfully launched a truly historic mission. At 3:22 pm ET on 30 May 2020, SpaceX became the first private space company to deliver NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). This marks the first time since
Glass frogs are strange creatures – much of their body is ‘transparent’, allowing you to literally see the organs inside. And now researchers may have figured out why this is the case. According to scientists the see-through skin of glass frogs isn’t really an example of true transparency, since the ‘glass’ skin isn’t uniformly distributed
SpaceX and NASA are gearing up for a historic mission: On Saturday, they plan to launch humans in a commercial spacecraft for the first time ever and restore the US’s ability to send its own astronauts into space. If clouds don’t delay the launch again (as they did on Wednesday), NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug
This summer, the clean energy company SINN Power is showcasing “the world’s first floating ocean hybrid platform” – a high-tech buoy that produces electricity from not one, not two, but three sources of renewable energy. Using waves, wind, and the sun, the SINN Power floating structure, which can supposedly withstand waves up to six
To realize its ambitious plans for sending up to 100 passengers to the Moon and Mars inside a massive Starship spacecraft, SpaceX is racing through prototypes. During its fifth static fire today, the fourth Starship prototype, called SN4, erupted in a gigantic fireball around 2:50 pm Eastern time on Friday. Thanks to a live stream,
Life during a global pandemic takes on a surreal quality. The ubiquitous presence of social media and a constant fire hose of depressing news can make it particularly hard if you’re already feeling anxious. So, we’ve put together a little round-up of recent science news that we find inspiring, encouraging, and worthy of note
Humans are social animals and that’s usually a good thing. But while there might be safety in numbers under some circumstances, new psychological research suggests human connection isn’t always a good thing. As social groups grow larger, in fact, humans may actually respond slower to an emerging crisis. A new psychological experiment reveals people
Scientists are constantly learning more about the tectonic plates shifting across our planet’s surface. According to new research, it turns out those plates have been around on Earth for longer than we originally thought – about a billion years longer, in fact. These giant slabs of rock sit in the Earth’s crust just above
Three boys from Bolivia let a black widow spider bite them in the hopes of gaining Spider-Man’s powers, but they ended up in hospital instead. The brothers, aged 12, 10, and 8, were herding goats in Chayanta when they found a spider, Telemundo first reported after a Ministry of Health official revealed the details at a coronavirus
Last year, an expedition hunting for the remains of a famous explorer’s ship off Antarctica’s coast instead uncovered traces of a very different kind of history, one stretching back thousands of years to the end of the last great ice age. Researchers have measured and mapped ridges on the ocean floor that represent a
Using state-of-the-art astronomical instruments, an international team of researchers has confirmed the existence of Proxima b, an Earth-like planet that’s orbiting the closest star to our Solar System, Proxima Centauri. “Confirming the existence of Proxima b was an important task, and it’s one of the most interesting planets known in the solar neighborhood,” Alejandro Suarez Mascareño,
Human pregnancy is downright curious. Today, we still don’t know why women go into labour for so long or why they face so much risk when they give birth. Progesterone is a hormone crucial to reproduction in many mammals, but for some unknown reason, it seems to act differently in humans. Research shows our
Throughout history, Earth has experienced at least five major mass extinctions that wiped out most life around the globe. Most of these events pretty clearly coincided with catastrophes such as asteroid impacts, geological activity, and volcanic eruptions. One event, however, is more of a mystery – the Late Devonian extinction 360 million years ago.
On the evening of Wednesday 27 May, residents of northern Turkey were treated to a spectacular light show. Videos on social media show what appears to be a meteor streaking across the sky, before exploding in the air with a thunderous boom. Turkish news website Daily Sabah reports that a “ball of light” was
Dormant “zombie fires” scattered across the Arctic region – remnants of record blazes last year – may be coming to life after an unusually warm and dry spring, scientists warned Wednesday. “We have seen satellite observations of active fires that hint that ‘zombie’ fires might have reignited,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist and wildfire expert
SpaceX was set to launch astronauts for the first time on Wednesday, thereby restoring NASA’s human spaceflight program. But then storm clouds rolled in. The rocket was fuelled and sitting on the launchpad. Officials had conducted final reviews to make sure everything was ready for liftoff, which was scheduled for 4:33 pm ET. NASA astronauts
Today is the day. At 4:33 pm ET, SpaceX is on track to become the first private space company to deliver NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The final launch preparations for the Demo-2 mission are currently taking place at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and we’re here to bring you a live blog of
On Wednesday at 4:33 pm ET, SpaceX plans to rocket its first people into orbit since Elon Musk founded the company 18 years ago. If successful, the historic mission would also resurrect NASA’s ability to launch its astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The US space agency flew its last space shuttle in July 2011 and has relied on
Some of our weirdest and most wonderful species are likely next in line for the sixth mass extinction during the current human-fuelled crisis. From butt-breathing, punk-haired Mary River turtles (Elusor macrurus) to big-eyed aye-ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis) with their strange extra thumbs, our activities are decimating many remarkable living beings. “These are some of the most
One of the biggest cosmic mysteries has just been used to investigate another huge mystery. Astronomers used powerful bursts of radio waves traced back to distant galaxies to probe the space between the stars – and revealed where the Universe’s missing matter has been hiding. In the vast chasms that yawn between galaxies, gas
Eating one’s own kind might be considered poor taste to us humans, but it’s a remarkably common survival tactic among other animals. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that dinosaurs also turned to cannibalism on occasion. A haul of fossils from over 150 million years ago has provided palaeontologists with a rare glimpse
This much we knew: some 66 million years ago an asteroid roughly twice the diameter of Paris crashed into Earth, wiping out all land-dwelling dinosaurs and 75 percent of life on the planet. What remained a mystery was whether it was a direct hit or more of a glancing blow, and which would be
Rats are growing increasingly aggressive in their hunt for food as restaurants across the US remain shuttered to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned. With many restaurants now only open for takeout services, the bins that used to be filled with scraps and refuse
The way chimpanzees smack their lips together has a similar rhythm to human speech, and a new study suggests this could be a clue to where our ancestors got their knack for language. The evolution of human speech is a mystery to us all, and there are few hints of it in non-human primates.
A federal judge ruled this week that a salvage company can go forward with a plan to recover the telegraph that the Titanic used to send out distress calls as it sank. RMS Titanic, Inc., the court-designated salvage company for the Titanic, plans to send a remote operated vehicle (ROV) into the Marconi suite, the
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. – commonly known as SpaceX – is slated to send two astronauts into space on Wednesday. Despite not yet being 20 years old, the company has already developed a creation myth: on 28 September 2008, its first rocket Falcon 1 launched for the fourth time. ”I messed up the first
Planet Nine is a theoretical, undiscovered giant planet in the mysterious far reaches of our Solar System. The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the tilt of the Sun’s spin axis to the apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune. But does Planet Nine actually
New satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA) reveal that the mysterious anomaly weakening Earth’s magnetic field continues to evolve, with the most recent observations showing we could soon be dealing with more than one of these strange phenomena. The South Atlantic Anomaly is a vast expanse of reduced magnetic intensity in Earth’s
A swirl spotted in the turbulent disc of dust encircling a young star called AB Aurigae was revealed last week in high resolution, and to much fanfare in the astronomy community. Such a distinctive disturbance, researchers suggested, could be the signature of a baby exoplanet in the process of forming. Although this baby exoplanet
Everyone is responsible for slowing the spread of the disease. Every action counts. This is also the case in the fight against misinformation, which intrudes on the overabundance of news, mixing facts, rumours and fake news. The World Health Organization (WHO) has described this phenomenon as an infodemic. Our research on social media propaganda
For decades, scientists have been intrigued and captivated by small, fuzzy balls of moss that slowly make their way across Arctic glaciers. Now we know more about how these ‘glacier mice’ are travelling together. While several reports have been filed observing these mossy balls, so far very little research has been done into how
Swearing is good for you. Well, kind of. A growing body of research suggests that, under the right circumstances, simply saying taboo words out loud seems to make people feel less pain – but not just any swear words will suffice, new findings reveal. Exactly how and why the act of swearing manages to
In the early days of the Universe, 10.8 billion years ago, astronomers have just found a galaxy wearing the battlescars of a cosmic brawl. It’s not a blob or disc of stars, like most galaxies, but a giant doughnut – with a huge hole punched right through its centre. This classifies it as a
New research details the hidden ecosystem that once acted as an Eden-like sanctuary for animal life, including early humans, at the southern tip of South Africa. The Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (PAP), now submerged by ocean waters off the South African coast, could have provided a rich habitat for all kinds of animals during glacial periods, when
In the beginning, everyone was skeptical. But Elon Musk’s SpaceX defied expectations – and on Wednesday hopes to make history by ferrying two NASA astronauts into space, the first crewed flight from US soil in nine long years. US President Donald Trump will be among the spectators at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to
When you wake up hungry and there’s nothing to eat, the most sensible thing to do is acquire snacks. In this, bumblebees are no different from humans. If they wake early from hibernation to find a scarcity of pollen, the insects have a cunning way to force plants to flower. Using their mandibles and
People around the world are already dying from the climate crisis, and yet all too often, official death records do not reflect the impact of these large-scale environmental catastrophes. According to a team of Australian health experts, heat is the most dominant risk posed by climate change in the country. If the world’s emissions
A US Navy ship downed a flying drone with a “solid state laser” in the Pacific Ocean, the service branch announced on Friday. The USS Portland (LPD-27), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship, deployed its Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) against an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) last week during a demonstration, the
Naturalists in Algeria have filmed a Saharan cheetah, a subspecies listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, for the first time in a decade, the national parks authority said. The animal was spotted in the Hoggar Mountains national park in the vast country’s desert south, parks official Salah Amokrane told the state-run
Was life on Earth a fluke? Perhaps not. New research suggests that the emergence of life on Earth, while far from a guaranteed outcome, was in fact a probable event – although the odds of intelligent life evolving remain rather less favourable. In a new study, astronomer David Kipping from Columbia University examines these
Our neurons talk in melodies; understanding their rhythms has proved key to creating a new device that could join their conversations. Just as glasses can aid our struggling eyes, the hope is that artificial brain matter could one day aid our brain bits that aren’t working as well as they could be. An international
If you’ve ever looked carefully at the snails in your garden, you may have noticed a curious quirk. Most of their shells spiral in the same direction. Every now and again, you might find one going the other way, but the odd ones out are extremely rare. This structural mirroring is a phenomenon known
The most powerful storms on our planet have grown substantially stronger, and almost forty years’ worth of hurricane satellite imagery suggest a warming planet might be fuelling the changes. According to the data, the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a category 3 storm or greater, with sustained winds of over 177 kilometres per
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