Science

WASHINGTON — NASA says SpaceX is on track to demonstrate in-space refueling of Starship next year, a critical technology for returning humans to the lunar surface using that vehicle. Speaking to the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee April 26, Amit Kshatriya, NASA deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program, said

How do we understand past societies? For centuries, our main sources of information have been pottery sherds, burial sites and ancient texts. But the study of ancient DNA is changing what we know about the human past, and what we can know. In a new study, we analysed the genetics of hundreds of people who

Solar sails are an enigmatic and majestic way to travel across the gulf of space. Drawing an analogy to the sail ships of the past, they are one of the most efficient ways of propelling craft in space. On Tuesday a RocketLab Electron rocket launched NASA’s new Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. It aims to

Over the last 25 years, the ozone hole which forms over Antarctica each spring has started to shrink. But over the last four years, even as the hole has shrunk it has persisted for an unusually long time. Our new research found that instead of closing up during November it has stayed open well into

Today we are in the middle of Solar Cycle 25, which began in 2019 and will last approximately until 2030, going through cyclical highs and lows of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and solar storms that will peak this or next year — making this a crucial period of time to invest in solar weather

Most of us have experienced the sudden, deafening blare of a car’s modified muffler, shattering your tranquility into a million pieces as it speeds past. If you live in a neighborhood where these disruptive sounds are familiar, it probably won’t surprise you that research links a desire to own this type of car to higher

There may not be any insects on Mars, but new photos from an orbiting spacecraft have revealed a plethora of ‘spiders’ that seem to scuttle across the dusty surface. They’re not, of course, real, living arachnids; rather, they are dark, spindly features on the Martian surface created entirely via non-biological processes. They are named “spiders”

Of all plastic waste pollution that can be traced back to its producer, almost a quarter can be traced back to just five major corporations, a new study has found. An international team of researchers analyzed some 1.87 million environmental plastic waste items logged between 2018 and 2022, finding more than half of the items

HELSINKI — Central American state Nicaragua has joined the ILRS moon base program as China continues its push to attract partners for the project. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) also reached agreements April 24 with the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, headquartered in Beijing, and the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences. The agreements

New research reveals that the process of remembering something long-term comes at a cost – specifically, inflammation in the brain and DNA damage in nerve cells, as the memories get ‘fused’ into neurons and stored. The international team of researchers suggests that memory formation is not unlike making an omelet by breaking a few eggs:

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is like a gift that keeps on giving. Not only is it still making astronomical discoveries after more than thirty years in operation. It is also making discoveries by accident! Thanks to an international team of citizen scientists, with the help of astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and

As the climate warms and Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets melt, the resulting rise in sea level has the potential to displace hundreds of millions of people around the world by the end of this century. A key uncertainty in how much and how fast the seas will rise lies in whether currently “stable” parts

WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab launched a South Korean smallsat and a NASA solar sail experiment on the company’s fifth flight of the year April 23. An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 6:32 p.m. Eastern. Liftoff was delayed nearly 20 minutes because of a problem with ground

When it comes to its connection to the sky, Stonehenge is best known for its solar alignments. Every midsummer’s night tens of thousands of people gather at Stonehenge to celebrate and witness the rising Sun in alignment with the Heel stone standing outside of the circle. Six months later a smaller crowd congregates around the

NASA’s Voyager 1 probe – the most distant man-made object in the Universe – is returning usable information to ground control following months of spouting gibberish, the US space agency announced Monday. The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could tell it was still receiving their

WASHINGTON — NASA is continuing to refine its response to a decadal survey for biological and physical sciences in space, balancing ambitious science goals with limited budgets. The decadal survey, released in September, identified 11 key science questions in three themes: adapting to space, living and traveling to space, and probing phenomena hidden by gravity

Research shows the way we perceive time passing, as either fast or slow, can be shaped by all manner of things, from our heartbeat and catching someone’s eye, to the familiarity of a place. A new study has found that the way images look can also shift our perception of moments passing. What’s more, the

You may never be able to go home again, as the old proverb asserts, but for a chunk of rock sharing Earth’s orbit around the Sun, you might at long last know where it is. The provenance of asteroid Kamo’oalewa, discovered in 2016, is something of a mystery, but astronomers believe it may be a

Last year Earth warmed around 0.2 °C more than climate models predicted. While that may not seem like much in isolation, when you consider it’s a measure across an entire planet it amounts to a heck of a lot of unexplained heat. “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded

WASHINGTON — The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded BlueHalo a $24.4 million contract to support the lab’s Satellite Assessment Center, an organization that models and analyzes the vulnerabilities of space systems.  BlueHalo, a defense contractor based in Arlington, Virginia, specializes in space, directed energy and autonomous systems technologies. The five-year contract was awarded by AFRL’s

The Voynich manuscript has long puzzled and fascinated historians and the public. This late-medieval document is covered in illustrations of stars and planets, plants, zodiac symbols, naked women, and blue and green fluids. But the text itself – thought to be the work of five different scribes – is enciphered and yet to be understood.

Saturn has 146 confirmed moons – more than any other planet in the Solar System – but one called Enceladus stands out. It appears to have the ingredients for life. From 2004 to 2017, Cassini – a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency – investigated Saturn, its rings,

A massive effort to ‘hand-map’ undocumented roads has revealed the staggering extent of illegal or informal thoroughfares cut through forests of Indonesia, Malaysia, and New Guinea. Using satellite imagery, researchers from Australia and Indonesia measured 1.37 million kilometers (851,000 miles) of thoroughfare – between three and seven times longer than the roads officially recorded in

WASHINGTON — Slovenia signed the Artemis Accords outlining best practices for sustainable space exploration April 19, the third European country to do so in five days. Matevž Frangež, state secretary of the ministry of the economy, tourism and sport in the Slovenian government, signed the Accords in a ceremony in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It took place

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained to see details in images that escape the human eye. Now an AI neural network has identified something unusual about a face in a Raphael painting: It wasn’t actually painted by Raphael. The face in question belongs to St Joseph, seen in the top left of the painting known

While details are understandably slim today, life on Earth is thought to have arisen about 4 billion years ago from a fateful blend of organic compounds popularly known as primordial soup. Just how – and where – the ingredients for this proto-biological entree were generated is still a field of debate, given the timeline and

Antarctica is a wonderland of stardust. There, amid the pristine whiteness of the ice and snow, scientists have retrieved more than 48,000 meteorites that have fallen to Earth over perhaps millions of years. But the reservoir isn’t going to last forever. New analysis suggests that warming temperatures are making the ice softer, resulting in meteorites

WASHINGTON — Spacecraft propulsion and launch vehicle company Astra Space considered filing for bankruptcy several times in recent months as the company struggled to raise cash. The company, which announced plans March 7 to go private in a deal with the company’s founders, released a delayed Form 10-K annual report with the U.S. Securities and

Humans have modified their bodies in various ways throughout history, tattooing, piercing, scarring, implanting, or even deforming parts of their anatomy. In spite of its ubiquity, it’s not always clear why. Cultural traditions are a strong factor, as are beauty standards, which vary across time and place. A new analysis of remains of individuals who

The most recognizable feature on Pluto is its “heart,” a relatively bright valentine-shaped area known as Tombaugh Regio. How that heart got started is one of the dwarf planet’s deepest mysteries – but now researchers say they’ve come up with the most likely scenario, involving a primordial collision with a planetary body that was a