WASHINGTON — Launch vehicle developer Astra is acquiring Apollo Fusion, a company developing electric propulsion systems for spacecraft, as part of its effort to create vertically integrated space systems. Astra is purchasing Apollo Fusion for $30 million in stock and $20 million in cash in a deal announced June 7. The deal includes an additional
Science
The world’s oldest known water was found in an ancient pool below Canada in 2016, and is at least 2 billion years old. Back in 2013 scientists found water dating back about 1.5 billion years at the Kidd Mine in Ontario, but in 2016, deeper investigation revealed an even older source buried underground. The initial discovery
A two-dimensional material with similar physical properties to graphene has now turned out to blow graphene out of the water in terms of toughness. The material is called hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and it’s so resistant to cracking that scientists are gobsmacked. The finding flies in the face of the fundamental description of fracture mechanics
With enough training, most humans can learn how to echolocate, using their tongue to make clicking sounds, and interpreting the sounds of the echoes that come back, reflected from the surrounding environment. In as few as 10 weeks, researchers were able to teach participants how to navigate obstacles and recognize the size and orientation of
A new discovery could soon be raising the total number of confirmed magnetars to 25. On 3 June, a brief X-ray burst close to the galactic plane caught the attention of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). Follow-up observation and analysis seem to confirm that it was emitted by a previously unknown magnetar, now named
The United Nations is urging governments around the world to rewild a billion hectares of degraded land in the next ten years. That’s a slice of the environment roughly the size of China – the sum of what numerous countries have already pledged to restore. But while humans are really good at making commitments to
China has achieved a new milestone in humanity’s experiments to harness the power of the stars. On Friday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ fusion machine reached 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) and clung onto this for 101 seconds. The last time EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak or HT-7U) held onto a writhing
Program manager Greg Spanjers: ’We don’t see SpaceX as being the only viable provider of this capability’ WASHINGTON — U.S. Air Force officials on June 4 expressed enthusiasm about the possibility that commercial space vehicles one day could be used to ship supplies around the world. “This never really made sense in the past” but
When seismic waves speed through the body of our planet, they appear to travel 3 percent faster when moving vertically from pole to pole, than horizontally from east to west. New models suggest this is because Earth’s solid core is growing faster on one side, deep beneath Indonesia’s Banda Sea, and slower on the other
Smashing together lead particles at 99.9999991 percent the speed of light, scientists have recreated the first matter that appeared after the Big Bang. Out of the wreck came a primordial type of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, or QGP. It only lasted a fraction of a second, but for the first time, scientists were able to
Most people aren’t trying to share fake news, but that’s part of the problem: Nobody thinks it’s their fault. In a recent survey of 8,285 Americans, 90 percent of respondents thought they were better than the average person at spotting false news on social media. Obviously, a lot of people were mistaken. When asked to
A huge cluster of stars has been found lurking in the Milky Way, just a relatively short cosmic distance from our own Solar System. Now around 75 million years old, the open cluster Valparaíso 1 is estimated to have contained around 10,000 solar masses’ worth of stars when it first blazed into existence. At just 7,000
Earth’s oceans are full of life, with multitudes of creatures making their home beneath the waves. But not everywhere in the deep blue sea is receptive to life’s presence. In recent years, scientists have become increasingly concerned about ‘dead zones’: areas of hypoxic waters in the ocean where oxygen levels are so low, marine animals
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operators have cleared a portion of C-band in a key step toward giving the spectrum to U.S. wireless companies in December. Work has now started on installing filters on ground antennas across the United States, so wireless operators can use the lower 120 MHz of C-band for 5G without interfering with
Discovering a new species and placing it on the tree of life is a big responsibility. I have been fortunate to name four species from some of the deepest, most remote and least sampled parts of the ocean. Each new species helps us uncover how life thrives in the hadal zone (anywhere deeper than 6,000
The legacy of one of the brightest stars in the physics firmament has been secured. Around 10,000 pages of the writings and other papers of legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking will be preserved in a special archive by the Cambridge University Library in the UK. This will include a digitization project, to be made freely
A 2,300-year-old ceramic jar filled with the bones of a dismembered chicken was likely part of an ancient curse to paralyze and kill 55 people in ancient Athens, archaeologists say. The finding reveals new evidence for how people tried to use “magic” in the city. They discovered the jar, along with a coin, beneath the floor
A newly discovered repeating fast radio burst (FRB) named FRB 20200120E is deepening the mystery of these already deeply mysterious space signals. Astronomers have tracked its location to a galaxy 11.7 million light-years away, which makes it the closest known fast radio burst, 40 times closer than the next-closest extragalactic signal. But it also appears
A heavily used group of pesticides, designed to kill insects upon contact, is also poisoning bee colonies. Scientists have discovered a way to deliver an antidote using pollen-like microparticles. The medicine is composed of a special enzyme that can break down certain groups of insecticides called organophosphates. These insecticides pose a deadly threat, but if the
HELSINKI — Russia and China are looking to announce new partnerships for a joint initiative to construct a robotic moon base ahead of potential crewed lunar missions. The first responses to invitations to join the International Lunar Research Station project (ILRS) are expected during bilateral meetings during the Global Space Exploration Conference 2021 (GLEX 2021)
For some time, seismologists have been aware of brief, subtle anomalies in underground electrical fields leading up to an earthquake, sometimes occurring as soon as a few weeks before the quake happens. It’s tempting to think these electromagnetic bursts could be used to predict when a quake will strike. Up until now, however, the cause of
One of the oldest known war cemeteries, discovered in the Nile River Valley, did not necessarily originate from a single epic battle like we once thought. According to a full reanalysis of this ancient burial site, known as Jebel Sahaba, the humans buried here were probably subject to a series of violent skirmishes rather than
Astronomers have created the most comprehensive map yet of all the dark matter in the universe. That’s no easy feat, considering dark matter is invisible. Scientists know this shadowy cousin of regular matter exists, though, because its strong gravitational forces can pull entire galaxies together. Based on observations of its influence, astronomers estimate that dark
Greenland’s melting ice sheet is unleashing an astonishing amount of mercury into the nation’s rivers and fjords. Downstream of three glaciers in the southwest, researchers have found coastal ecosystems are swimming in high concentrations of the heavy metal, which can build up in the food web to toxic levels. The quantity of mercury observed in
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb’s broadband constellation is set to pass the 200th mark after Arianespace successfully launched its latest batch of satellites May 28. Arianespace launched 36 satellites on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket 1:38 p.m. Eastern from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in Russia, which will enlarge OneWeb’s fleet to 218 satellites. The mission was initially scheduled for
A study has found that monkeys are capable of picking up new “accents” to be more friendly to their neighbors. The study, which was published earlier this month in the peer-reviewed Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology journal, looked at two different species of monkeys that live in the Brazilian Amazon: The bald-headed white pied tamarins and their
To make some of the most precise measurements we can of the world around us, scientists tend to go small – right down to the atomic scale, using a technique called atom interferometry. Now, for the first time, scientists have performed this kind of measurement in space, using a sounding rocket specially designed to carry
A set of cut and sharpened turkey bones excavated decades ago from an ancient Native American grave seem to be the oldest tattooing tools we’ve found to date. A new, detailed analysis of these artifacts has allowed archaeologists to determine that they were likely used to tattoo skin, bringing us a little closer to understanding
Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa is increasingly looking like the best place in the Solar System to search for extraterrestrial life. New modeling suggests that the rocky mantle, deep below the thick ice and salty ocean, could actually be hot enough for volcanic activity. Moreover, it could have been this hot over most of its 4.5-billion
While the rest of the world continues to tackle the global pandemic, in eastern Australia, waves of mice are flooding farms and towns. For months now, this plague has been wreaking havoc on crops, damaging electrical wires in buildings, and even biting hospital patients, leaving a stench of rodent urine and feces in its wake.