The tech and science world has had a very interesting week: Researchers have discovered what happens when you give our favorite tentacled, ocean-dwelling friends MDMA, landed rovers on asteroids, confirmed the oldest known animal fossil on the planet, and found something very weird going on with a distant neutron star…
Two landers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have successfully touched down on the Ryugu asteroid after separating from the Hayabusa2 probe in orbit, and have begun transmitting images from the space rock’s surface.
The European Union passed its disastrous Copyright Directive this week, including amended versions of its onerous Articles 11 and 13 (the so-called “link tax” and “upload filter,” respectively). There’s still time to make sure it never passes into law by defeating a final ratification vote in January, though given the …
California Governor Jerry Brown announced on Friday at the Global Climate Action Summit that the state would be launching its “own damn satellite” amid concern that Donald Trump’s administration is minimizing NASA’s role in climate research, Politico reported.
NASA’s last Delta II rocket blasted into the atmosphere from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Saturday carrying the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), Space.com reported, in the rocket’s 155th and final mission.
Researchers with the University of California, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center Breakthrough Listen team have deployed new neural net technology to help analyze the reams of data they’ve collection—and they quickly discovered a set of mysterious, as-of-yet unexplained fast radio bursts from a distant galaxy, per…
We’re up for a big week in the news, folks. There’s a lot going to happen, from Apple’s big September 12th announcement event to the notably less fun Hurricane Florence, which is currently projected to barrel into the East Coast at a minimum Category 3 status or possibly even worse before the weekend. As the president…
Sitting atop Saturn’s north pole is one of the Solar System’s most striking weather patterns: a rotating, color-changing hexagon slightly wider than Earth. A new study shows there’s another hexagon directly on top of the first one—and that’s weird.
Accomplished astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell has won a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of pulsars 50 years ago and continued leadership in science.
Jupiter is strange for a number of reasons. It’s the biggest planet in our Solar System, of course. It harbors perhaps the most intense radiation environments. And, according to a new study, it has a magnetic field unlike that of any other known planet.
Sometimes, things line up just perfectly. For example, back in 2017, the Hubble Space Telescope got a full view of Saturn’s northern aurora. The newly-released image above isn’t exactly what Hubble saw—but it’s still exciting, I promise.
Astronaut candidate Robb Kulin has become the first NASA astronaut-in-training to leave midway through the process in 50 years, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced where its Hayabusa2 spacecraft will attempt a landing on the asteroid Ryugu.
Read anything interesting in the news lately? No, really. I’m still catching up, because for much of the past week, I was vacationing in lovely Cook Forest, Pennsylvania, during which my access to the internet was limited to whatever stretches of 4G could be obtained amid supply runs to town. This was indeed lovely—an…
The mere fact that we live in a universe boggles my mind every once in a while. But thankfully, our cosmic home is a place that follows rules; the laws of physics seem to agree everywhere, and galaxies are uniformly distributed throughout. Except for in this 300-million-light-year-long region, which seems to be…
Scientists directly observed the signal of iron and titanium atoms in the atmosphere of an exoplanet 600 light-years from Earth, a new paper reports.
First, the bad news: Sunday is the anniversary of the disastrous white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in a neo-Nazi car attack that killed local woman Heather Heyer and wounded scores of others, as well as resulted in the deaths of two police officers. The organizer of…
The Parker Solar Probe blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday, setting itself on course to become both the fastest human craft ever launched (in the neighborhood of 430,000 miles per hour) and the first to probe the outer corona of the sun.
As it speeds away from the Sun, the New Horizons mission may be approaching a “wall.”
Everyone knows there is no sound in space. After all, a sound wave requires a medium, like air or water, to travel through, and space is mostly a vacuum. But in studying a nearby galaxy cluster, astronomers detected a true occurrence of sound in space—and in this case, the incredibly deep sound was coming from a black…
