Science

The International Space Station won’t be around forever, and NASA is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its potential replacements. One promising candidate is Orbital Reef – a joint venture between Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin and Sierra Space. On Wednesday, NASA reported that Orbital Reef passed four key milestones for some of

TAMPA, Fla. — The U.K.’s space agency plans to open new headquarters in June at the Harwell Science Campus space cluster in England to strengthen ties with the commercial industry. UK Space Agency (UKSA) has been headquartered in nearby Swindon since it was born out of the British National Space Centre 14 years ago. It

The voice of a woman largely overlooked by history has been discovered in a “dangerous” declaration attributed to the father of famous playwright William Shakespeare. It’s known as the “Spiritual Testament“, discovered in the rafters of Shakespeare House in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1757, signed by one J. Shakespeare. Historians have interpreted this J. Shakespeare to mean

The Earth’s place in space is a fairly familiar one with it orbiting an average star. The star – our Sun – orbits the centre of our Galaxy the Milky Way. From here onwards, the story is less well known. The Milky Way is part of a large structure called the Laniakea Supercluster which is

The last time Patricia Cooper attended a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, she wasn’t sure what she was getting into. It was January 2020 and Cooper, at the time a vice president at SpaceX, had agreed to represent the company on a panel discussion at the conference on the interference satellite constellations could create

Contrary to what we may have assumed about the migration of modern humans out of Africa, at least some movement may have been driven, not by ‘green corridors‘, but by privation. A new analysis involving volcanic glass found in Ethiopia reveals humans lived in what could have been drought conditions in the Horn of Africa

There are plenty of craters on Mars, especially when compared to Earth. That is primarily thanks to the lack of weathering forces and strong plate tectonics that disrupt the formations of such impacts on our home planet. However, not all impact craters on Mars are directly caused by asteroid impacts. Many of them are caused

WASHINGTON — AT&T is prepared to provide more funds to help get AST SpaceMobile’s direct-to-smartphone constellation plans off the ground. AST SpaceMobile raised $155 million from AT&T and other investors in January, but the satellite operator needs more capital to provide 5G connectivity globally from low Earth orbit to phones and other devices outside cell

There’s a large part of human history hidden beneath the sea. From Canada’s coastlines to the flat underwater fringes of Australia, sunken sites around the world have delivered troves of artifacts that give archaeologists a deeper understanding of where ancient humans lived and how they potentially traversed treacherous seas to reach new lands. Stone Age

Relics of the Milky Way’s birth have just been discovered hiding in plain sight. Towards the center of the galaxy, two streams of stars nearly as old as the Universe have been discovered circling the heart of the Milky Way. A new analysis based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope strongly suggests

Our love for coffee means millions of tons of spent coffee grounds going to waste every single year. Scientists have been working on ways to make use of them, and we now have another to add to the list: old coffee grounds have been shown to absorb bentazone, a herbicide used in agriculture. If the

Neuralink on Wednesday streamed a video of its first human patient playing computer chess with his mind and talking about the brain implant making that possible. Noland Arbaugh, 29, who was left paralyzed from the shoulders down by a diving accident eight years ago, told of playing chess and the videogame “Civilization” as well as

WASHINGTON — Soaring demand for backup connectivity after subsea cables were cut in the Red Sea is helping push Rivada Space Networks closer to fully financing its $2.4 billion constellation plans, according to CEO Declan Ganley. In the weeks following an incident affecting a quarter of the internet traffic passing between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East,

For Michel Talagrand, who won the Abel mathematics prize on Wednesday, maths provided a fun life free from all constraints – and an escape from the eye problems he suffered as a child. “Maths, the more you do it, the easier it gets,” the 72-year-old said in an interview with AFP. He is the fifth

There’s something peculiar about dying star Betelgeuse. Yeah, there was the whole sneeze thing. That’s been pretty much resolved for now. But before the Great Dimming Debacle of 2019, scientists spotted something even more peculiar about the giant star. Radio measurements of its changing light suggested it was rotating at 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per

Global temperatures “smashed” heat records last year, as heatwaves stalked oceans and glaciers suffered record ice loss, the United Nations said Tuesday – warning 2024 was likely to be even hotter. The annual State of the Climate report by the UN weather and climate agency confirmed preliminary data showing 2023 was by far the hottest

A company co-founded by Bill Gates is about to start building next-generation nuclear power plants in the US. Chris Levesque, CEO of TerraPower, told the Financial Times that his firm will start building at a site near a coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming in June, even if it hasn’t received a construction permit from regulators

WASHINGTON — Geostationary satellite operator Intelsat has bought at least five times more capacity from Eutelsat’s OneWeb low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation to strengthen its multi-orbit broadband strategy. The companies announced March 19 that Intelsat has made a firm commitment to buy $250 million worth of LEO capacity over six years starting mid-2024. Intelsat also

The human brain, it turns out, can be surprisingly resistant to the ravages of time. A new study has cataloged human brains that have been found on the archaeological record around the world and discovered that this remarkable organ resists decomposition far more than we thought – even when the rest of the body’s soft

A nearby exploding star is due to offer a spectacular show that could outshine our North Star this year. The star, which is 3,000 light-years from Earth, is expected to burst in a gigantic explosion – known as a nova – in the coming months. NASA said in a statement that the once-a-lifetime event could

WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency’s network of sensor satellites in low Earth orbit — known as Tracking Layer Tranche 1 — will not include seven satellites made by Raytheon Technologies as originally planned.  “SDA is reevaluating and considering re-scoping Raytheon’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer work,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement in response

Some 900,000 years ago, humans nearly went extinct. According to the results of a genomics study published last year, modern humanity’s ancestors were reduced to a breeding population of barely 1,300 individuals in a devastating bottleneck that brought us to the very brink of annihilation. Now, a new study has found that a mass migration

Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe’s currently accepted age

A new study has revealed that threatening anti-piracy messages can actually lead to people pirating more digital content in some cases – although men and women tend to respond very differently to the messaging used. Men were found to typically increase piracy behaviors after seeing messages that threatened legal action and other negative consequences over

WASHINGTON — Turion Space’s debut satellite should be ready to start imaging objects in space by May after nearly a year of commissioning in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to CEO and cofounder Ryan Westerdahl. The three-year-old Californian space situational awareness (SSA) startup first opened the door to the imaging sensor on its 32-kilogram Droid.001

The most populous country in the world, India, has long been left out of genetic studies, leaving a massive gap in our understanding of human origins and appreciation of the genetic diversity of our species. A new study diving 50,000 years into the past by analyzing thousands of genomes has sought to change that, revealing

Eventually, we’re going to want to expand the World Wide Web across the galaxy, and NASA recently demonstrated a key piece of tech that could help, beaming messages via laser across a distance of almost 16 million kilometers (10 million miles). That’s about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth, and the accomplishment,

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Despite not making it to the moon, NASA and others flying payloads on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander say they still got useful data from the mission. Peregrine launched Jan. 8 on the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. The spacecraft, though, suffered a propellant leak hours after launch that

Getting into ‘the zone’ when being creative can be tricky, even if you’ve been there before. People strive for this famous mental state in a wide range of endeavors, many hoping for even just a few moments of fun, effortless productivity. Also known as ‘flow,’ the state of mind is a real psychological phenomenon, albeit

Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, flew further and faster than ever before during its third test launch Thursday, although it was eventually lost as it re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said. Lift-off from the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came at 8:25 am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried