Just when you think orcas couldn’t possible be any more awesome, they get even better. New evidence shows these whales are really good at scaring off the most feared beast in the sea. Yep. Orcas have toppled the great white shark off their ‘apex predator’ throne. A team of marine scientists has found that great
Month: June 2019
We know inoculation halts the spread of disease. As it turns out, the same concept can also be used for misinformation. Researchers at the University of Cambridge think they’ve found a way to ‘inoculate’ the public against fake news. All it takes is an online role-playing game, where anyone who wishes can safely enter the mindset of
Subglacial lakes are some of the least explored and most important natural features on Earth. We have also vastly underestimated their prevalence and impact. Now, more than 400 of these lakes have been found beneath the Antarctic continent. Yet as recently as the 1950s, scientists thought this ice sheet contained no liquid water whatsoever. Now,
WASHINGTON — The next major milestone in the development of the spacecraft designed to take humans back to the moon will be a three-minute test flight this week to ensure astronauts can escape in the event of an emergency. NASA plans to conduct the Ascent Abort-2 (AA-2) test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station July
For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to create complex, three-dimensional simulations of the Universe. It’s called the Deep Density Displacement Model, or D3M, and it’s so fast and so accurate that the astrophysicists who designed it don’t even know how it does what it does. What it does is accurately simulate the
The Combined Forces Space Component Command at Vandenberg will be responsible to support military commanders with space services. The Joint Task Force Space Defense at Shriever will focus on protecting satellites. VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — U.S. Space Command will be officially established in the coming weeks. While the location of the command’s headquarters
A NASA Mars Curiosity rover team member gives an update on developments and status of the planetary exploration mission. The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft delivered Curiosity to its target area on Mars at 1:31:45 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6, 2012 which includes the 13.8 minutes needed for confirmation of the touchdown to be radioed to
Nearly 200 artefacts from the NASA missions of 1960s and 1970s, including the Apollo and Gemini programmes, will go on auction on July 18 at Christie’s New York. The much-anticipated auction, titled ‘One Giant Leap: Celebrating Space Exploration 50 Years After Apollo 11’, is highlighted by a written record kept by Neil Armstrong and Buzz
You’d think it would be easy to spot a whale shark having sex – after all, they’re amongst the largest creatures on Earth. But to this day, we have no record of their encounters, even though this week one human did get tantalisingly close. Flying above the remote Ningaloo reef in Western Australia, pilot Tiffany
For the first time, scientists have clearly linked together two types of gamma-ray phenomena in thunderclouds, suggesting that weak bursts of gamma-ray activity might precede lightning flashes in certain conditions. The two phenomena in question are weak emissions called gamma-ray glows, which last about a minute, and much shorter and more intense terrestrial gamma-ray flashes
Sometimes you just need to take a step back from the huge number of issues here on Earth, take a deep breath, and stare at the soothing movements of the solar photosphere. In this case, thanks to the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope (SST) in Spain, you can enjoy a close-up of the pulsing blobs moving
In the salt water marshes of southern California, a splashing killifish is easy prey for a hungry shorebird. Like a jerking marionette, the helpless creature shimmies and flashes on the surface of the water. And all the while, hiding deep in its brain, an invisible other quietly pulls the strings. The puppeteer in question is
WASHINGTON — A reusable suborbital rocket developed by Exos Aerospace suffered a loss of attitude control seconds after liftoff on a test flight June 29, but the rocket was still able to glide safely back to Earth. Exos’ Suborbital Autonomous Rocket with GuidancE, or SARGE, rocket lifted off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at
SpaceX just provided a raft of significant updates on the launch of its first five dozen internet-providing satellites. The long-term goal of the program, called Starlink, is to eventually launch thousands of satellites into orbit around Earth in order to bathe the planet in high-speed internet access. Elon Musk’s company rocketed the first 60 spacecraft
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The first commercial mission for SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy launch system will likely take place in 2021, a company executive said June 26. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s vice president of commercial sales, said the company is in talks with prospective customers for the first commercial launch of that system roughly two years
Every now and again, our radio telescopes capture a mystery. A single flash, as powerful in radio wavelengths as half-a-billion Suns, condensed into a burst that lasts just a few milliseconds at most. Now, for the very first time, astrophysicists have traced one of these one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) to its source. “This is the
WASHINGTON — A Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched an Earth imaging satellite and several smaller satellites on a mission for rideshare services company Spaceflight June 29. The Electron lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 12:30 a.m. Eastern, with the rocket’s upper stage deploying the satellites into low
Once a time consuming, labor intensive task, the making of stone floors with elaborate designs can now be done in a factory in just hours. | http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/how-its-made/ Watch full episodes: http://bit.ly/HowItsMadeFullEpisodes Subscribe to Science Channel: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=sciencechannel Check out SCI2 for infinitely awesome science videos. Every day. http://bit.ly/SCI2YT Download the TestTube app: http://testu.be/1ndmmMq
The GOES-16 weather satellite is designed to detect flashes of lightning. On Saturday, it saw an asteroid. On Saturday afternoon, meteorologists noticed an unusually bright flash signature over the Caribbean waters 170 miles south of Puerto Rico. Its light was visible in an area as large as Rhode Island – far too big to be
You’ve got to hand it to the cockroach. Human progress might be an apocalypse for other animal species, but not these guys. And now it’s clear they’re having a jolly good laugh at our puny attempts to control them with pesticides. A study on how quickly populations of German cockroach (Blattella germanica) bounce back after
For its newest planetary science mission, NASA aims to land a flying robot on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, a top target in the search for alien life. Dragonfly will be the first endeavor of its kind. NASA’s car-sized quadcopter, equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, is slated to launch in
Northern Spain is facing its largest forest fires in two decades as the heat wave scorching much of Europe continues to intensify. The fires have swept across Spanish province of Tarragona, near Barcelona, with officials warning that it could eventually engulf as much as 20,000 hectares (200 square kilometers) of land. “We’re facing a serious
VICTORIA, British Columbia – The Canadian government will launch a new satellite in 2022 to demonstrate the use of quantum technology for protecting commercial and national communication networks. Honeywell has received a 30 million Canadian dollar ($23 million) contract from the Canadian Space Agency for the design and implementation phases of agency’s Quantum EncrYption and
Around a young star not far from Earth, a broad disc of dust swirls. This is the stuff that planets are made of – and astronomers think a huge clump spotted and photographed in the outer edge of the disc is in the early stages of becoming one. If they’re right, this will mark the
HELSINKI — The Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover resumed science and exploration activities June 27 for the start of the mission’s seventh lunar day on the far side of the moon. The 140-kilogram Yutu-2 (Jade Rabbit-2) rover awoke at 1:26 a.m. Eastern, followed by the lander at 9:45 p.m., with both spacecraft and their science
For the first time, scientists have found a blue-feathered bird in the fossil record, thanks to a new discovery that lets us tell which fossilised pigments are, in fact, blue. After millions of years of fossilisation, feathers are long gone, but melanin pigment packages called melanosomes can be preserved – up until now the problem
Nothing says welcome to the future like having your wound fixed by a tiny lightsaber. It might sound wild at first, but that’s basically what a new plasma technology advance is now promising. This exciting development means we could soon commercialise low-temperature atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) that operate out in open air, promising a
Turns out fungus might be better suited for space travel than people are. New research has found that mould can survive incredibly high doses of ionising radiation, which means we may have to keep a very careful eye out for spores that might hitch a ride to Mars. Blasted with radiation in a controlled setting,
This April, renewables were put to the test like never before. For the first time in United States history, clean energy sources shouldered more of the nation’s electricity needs than coal. A monthly report from the Energy Information Administration shows that renewables such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric dams provided 23 percent of the month’s
Air Force officials see growing support for space on Capitol Hill and DoD despite ongoing leadership changes. LOS ANGELES — The Senate on Thursday passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 by a vote of 86-8. The bill authorizes the establishment of a U.S. Space Force under the Air
Photo Credit: Twitter/ PIB India had shot down one of its satellites in space with an anti-satellite missile in March this year The debris created by India’s anti-satellite missile when it shot down once of the country’s own satellites in a test earlier this year is still floating around the Earth, a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
In 1949, famous physicist Lars Onsager published a paper discussing the potential implications of superfluids and turbulence. Now, 70 years later, a team of Australian researchers has conducted an experiment to back his theory – using a tiny quantum version of Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’ to do it. The swirling fluids on the surface of
Scientists have long speculated that at the heart of a gas giant, the laws of material physics undergo some radical changes. In these kinds of extreme pressure environments, hydrogen gas is compressed to the point that it actually becomes a metal. For years, scientists have been looking for a way to create metallic hydrogen synthetically
WASHINGTON — NASA announced June 27 it will send a spacecraft to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, to fly across its surface to study how life there, and on the early Earth, could have developed. The agency said it selected Dragonfly as the next mission in its New Frontiers line of medium-class planetary science
The super-thin ‘wonder material’ graphene has been shaking up science for years with its amazing properties, but things get really interesting when you stack this 2D nanomaterial up against itself. In new experiments, physicists in the US have found that when graphene is assembled in a double-layer vertical stack – with two adjacent sheets of
A core part of a SpaceX rocket narrowly missed a landing pad, crashed into the sea, and exploded during a test that CEO Elon Musk described as the “most difficult” in company history. At around 2:30 am ET (7:30 am UTC) on Tuesday, a Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, which was
Col. Robert Bongiovi: “Two is the right number from a mission assurance perspective.” LOS ANGELES — Air Force officials continue to press their case against legislative efforts to allow more than two companies to receive contracts in the next phase of the national security space launch program. “Two is the right number from a mission
As far as feathered animals go, Pachystruthio dmanisensis was a monster. With an estimated mass of about 450 kilograms (nearly half a tonne), it would make a 150-kilogram adult ostrich – the world’s largest living bird – look like a canary. Bigger birds have existed, but it’s not so much its size that makes this flightless
Our entire living reality happens in a three-dimensional Universe, so naturally it’s hard to imagine a universe with just two dimensions. But, according to new calculations, a 2D universe could actually support life, too. The new paper is the work of physicist James Scargill at the University of California, Davis, who wanted to test the
It seems like the stuff of dreams, the idea that humanity will one day venture beyond the Solar System and become an interstellar species. Who knows? Given enough time and the right technology (and assuming there’s not some serious competition), we might even be able to colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy someday. And while
Researchers at Princeton released a new study on how many online shopping sites use coercive so-called “dark pattern” techniques to trick people into spending more money. “This is manipulating users into making decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make and buying stuff they don’t need,” Gunes Acar, a research associate at Princeton who helped run the study,
WASHINGTON — As NASA selects its next major planetary science mission, the agency is also funding studies of very small missions that seek to capitalize on advances in smallsat technology. NASA issued a media advisory June 26 stating it would announce the selection of “a major new science mission to explore our solar system” at
Facebook dismissed calls for a break-up of the world’s biggest social network and other big internet companies on Monday, saying this would not tackle issues such as privacy, attempts to influence elections or harmful content. “Just because it is difficult to regulate the internet doesn’t mean policy makers should jump to the alternative of wishing
Watching a volcano erupt would be cool. But having a front-row seat 254 miles (408 kilometers) above the volcano? That would be a view. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured the breathtaking scene Saturday showing the vigorous eruption of the Raikoke volcano. Raikoke is an uninhabited island along the Kuril chain, a necklace of
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian satellite operator Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN) plans to continue its ongoing fleet expansion with a new satellite carrying 300 gigabits per second of capacity by 2023. Dani Indra Widjanarko, director of planning and development at PSN, said the company is still designing the satellite — which would increase its fleet size
In latest gruesome nature news, scientists have discovered new details on a fungus that compels its cicada hosts to mate long after their genitals have gone and their bodies have turned into what one researcher colourfully describes as ‘flying salt shakers of death’. The fungus is called Massospora cicadina, and its effects read like an abstinence
In the bewildering quagmire that is the gas between the stars, the Hubble Space Telescope has identified evidence of ionised buckminsterfullerene, the carbon molecule known colloquially as “buckyballs”. Containing 60 carbon atoms arranged in a soccer ball shape, buckminsterfullerene (C60) occurs naturally here on Earth – in soot. But in 2010, it was also detected in
An ancient water conservation technique once used in Peru could be making a comeback in the modern era, as the country struggles with extreme dry seasons amidst a population rise. Researchers estimate the technique – used by indigenous peoples of the region – is at least 1,400 years old. It involves diverting water from streams
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