NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore speaks with reporters Wednesday at the Kennedy Space Center. Credit: NASA / Joel Kowsky The NASA astronauts training for the first crew missions on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will be closely watching each step of the capsule’s unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station, set for blastoff Thursday from Cape Canaveral … Read more
Like many octopuses, the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) declines and dies shortly after breeding. Credit: Tom Kleindinst, Marine Biological Laboratory Changes in cholesterol production lead to a tragic octopus death spiral. New research finds remarkable parallels in steroid hormone biology across cephalopods, mice, and humans that can have dire consequences when disrupted. Despite their … Read more
A close-up of the tooth from a ‘birds-eye’ viewpoint. Credit: Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen / CNRS Paris) Denisovans, a sister species of modern humans, inhabited Laos from 164,000 to 131,000 years ago with important implications for populations out of Africa and Australia. What connects a finger bone and some fossil teeth discovered in a … Read more
SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a host of other private companies helped to make 2021 the year with the most space launches in history, but scientists say this mad dash to space could be causing further damage to our atmosphere. The number of launch attempts has doubled in the last decade. And after counting all of … Read more
Robots have traditionally been purpose-built to perform a single, very specific task, but researchers from Beihang University are taking a much different approach with a new robotic drone that can operate underwater just as easily as in the air, and it features a clever, nature-inspired trick for maximizing its range. When you think of robots, … Read more
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was hoisted on top of ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket May 4 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Credit: United Launch Alliance Running years late, Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule program is poised for a crucial unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station set for launch Thursday, a do-over of an abbreviated 2019 … Read more
This is the first image of Sagittarius A * (Sgr A *), the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). It is the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole. Credit: EHT Collaboration Astronomers reveal the first image of the[{” attribute=””>black hole … Read more
Transmission electron microscope image of silicon-28 nanowire with a layer of silicon dioxide on the surface. Credit: Matthew R. Jones and Muhua Sun / Rice University Scientists have demonstrated a new material that conducts heat 150% more efficiently than conventional materials used in advanced chip technologies. The device — an ultrathin silicon nanowire — could … Read more
Illustration of cloud-like ionized plasma in the ITER fusion reactor tokamak. Credit: ITER Physicists at EPFL, within a large European collaboration, have revised one of the fundamental laws that has been foundational to[{” attribute=””>plasma and fusion research for over three decades, even governing the design of megaprojects like ITER. The update demonstrates that we can … Read more
Researchers have found over 1,700 asteroid trails in archived Hubble data from the last 20 years. While many of the asteroids are previously known, more than 1,000 are not. What good are another 1,000 asteroids? Like all asteroids, they could hold valuable clues to the Solar System’s history. As time passes and more and more … Read more
