Science

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Small launch vehicle developers are working to carve out niches in a market for smallsat launches that is increasingly dominated by SpaceX’s Transporter rideshare missions. The Transporter missions, which fill a Falcon 9 often with more than 100 smallsats, offer per-kilogram prices significantly below dedicated small launch vehicles. SpaceX has seen

Archaeologists in Morocco have unearthed more than 80 human footprints dating back around 100,000 years and believed to be the oldest in North Africa. The footprints, probably left by five Homo sapiens, including children, were discovered on the coast of Larache, a city 90 kilometres (55 miles) south of Tangier, by archaeologists from Morocco, Spain,

New measurements of the orbit of Saturn‘s smallest major moon suggests there’s a big secret lurking beneath its icy crust. Mimas, whose cratered surface bears more than a passing resemblance to the Death Star from Star Wars, only makes sense if there’s a liquid ocean swirling around 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 19 miles)

Heat trapped by fossil fuel emissions is making Earth’s atmosphere ‘huff and puff’ with increasing fury. Some winds are now blowing so intensely that researchers propose adding an even more extreme category to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. “As a cautious scientist, you never want to cry wolf,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory climate scientist Michael

TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat expects to start providing Wi-Fi to planes by the end of June from ViaSat-3 F1, the satellite that lost more than 90% of its 1 terabit per second capacity after an antenna deployment failure last year. The geostationary satellite is otherwise performing well and should be operating commercially at some point

Like the crooked finger of a fairy-tale witch, a fragmented ivory artifact recovered from an Ice Age dig site in southwest Germany several years ago almost wills to be pointed with sorcerous intent. Similar items have been discovered across the continent over the past century, all inviting speculation over the objects’ purposes. Whittled into points,

Astronomers working with the JWST found a dwarf galaxy they weren’t looking for. It’s about 98 million light years away, has no neighbors, and was in the background of an image of other galaxies. This isolated galaxy shows a lack of star-formation activity, which is very unusual for an isolated dwarf. Most isolated dwarf galaxies

Chemical records written in sea sponge skeletons suggest we passed the critical threshold of 1.5 °C of warming as early as 2010. If true, this places us close to – or even at – about 2 °C today. Being ahead of schedule would explain why such extreme climate consequences have been walloping us far sooner

As we head into 2024 and look around, the space industry is fundamentally different from what it was decades ago, thanks to first- and second-order effects from embracing commercial innovation. SpaceX set a record-breaking cadence of nearly 100 launches last year, heralding a new revolution in access to space. The Space Development Agency (SDA) operationalized

Researchers peering back through 800 years of history have concluded that Mayapan – the capital of culture and politics for the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th and 14th century CE – may well have been undone by drought. That drought would have led to civil conflict, which would, in turn, have

Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko has officially become the human being with the most time logged in space, Roscosmos has announced. As of 4 February 2024, at 08:30:08 UTC, the Russian crew member had cumulatively logged more than 878 days aboard the International Space Station, and counting, over multiple missions since 2008. The previous record holder,

Land hermit crabs have been using bottle tops, parts of old light bulbs and broken glass bottles, instead of shells. New research by Polish researchers studied 386 images of hermit crabs occupying these artificial shells. The photos had been uploaded by users to online platforms, then analyzed by scientists using a research approach known as

HELSINKI — A pair of Chinese rockets launched 11 mobility services satellites for an automaker and nine further, diverse satellites into orbit late Friday. A Long March 2C rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China at 6:37 p.m. Eastern (2337 UTC) Feb. 2, followed hours later by a Jielong-3 solid rocket

If you’re fascinated by Nature, these images of spiral galaxies won’t help you escape your fascination. These images show incredible detail in 19 spirals, imaged face-on by the JWST. The galactic arms with their multitudes of stars are lit up in infrared light, as are the dense galactic cores, where supermassive black holes reside. The

Based on satellite imagery, geologists have determined major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, some areas as much as 2 to 5 millimeters (.08-0.2 inches) per year. Called subsidence, this sinking of land is happening at a faster rate than was estimated just a year ago. In a new paper published in the

Elon Musk on Monday claimed in a post on X that a Neuralink brain implant has, for the first time, been inserted into a human patient’s brain. “The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well,” Musk wrote. “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” The first product is called Telepathy,

ORLANDO, Fla. — The emergent on-orbit servicing market faces a case of misaligned expectations. On one side, companies developing technologies to provide satellite maintenance, repair and other on-orbit services seek an early government commitment to bring about private investment.  A flagship customer for these services, the U.S. Space Force, has funded development projects and demonstrations,

Balmy summer nights alive with the sounds of cicadas are so relaxing, until all manner of unruly insects swarm your lights. As much of a nuisance as this may be to us, what’s happening to them is far worse. Imperial College London zoologist Samuel Fabian and colleagues used advanced videography techniques to discover centuries of

Time’s inexorable march might well wait for no one, but a new experiment by researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and Roskilde University in Denmark shows how in some materials it might occasionally shuffle. An investigation into the way substances like glass age has uncovered the first physical evidence of a material-based

Archaeologists discovered human remains ceremonially adorned with buckets on their feet and rings around their necks in a 1,000-year-old cemetery, reports say. Archaeologists discovered the mass grave holding over 107 skeletons in what is believed to have been a pagan-era cemetery near Kyiv, Ukraine. The mysterious burial site provided a glimpse into the Dark Ages,

If signs of life really do exist on Mars, there’s a chance the Perseverance rover has already rolled over them. Underground radar images suggest it is searching in the perfect spot for fossilized microbial life. As the robotic explorer, nicknamed Percy, wheels across a three-billion-year-old landscape, its instruments have confirmed that at least one Martian

Climate scientists don’t like surprises. It means our deep understanding of how the climate works isn’t quite as complete as we need. But unfortunately, as climate change worsens, surprises and unprecedented events keep happening. In March 2022, Antarctica experienced an extraordinary heatwave. Large swathes of East Antarctica experienced temperatures up to 40°C (72°F) above normal,

WASHINGTON — A Cygnus cargo spacecraft is set to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, a combination that required more changes to the rocket than to the spacecraft. NASA announced at a Jan. 26 briefing that it was targeting Jan. 30 at 12:07 p.m. Eastern for the launch of the NG-20

Were dinosaurs already on their way out when an asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, ending the Cretaceous, the geologic period that started about 145 million years ago? It’s a question that has vexed paleontologists like us for more than 40 years. In the late 1970s, debate began about whether dinosaurs were at their

Human behaviour is an enigma that fascinates many scientists. And there has been much discussion over the role of probability in explaining how our minds work. Probability is a mathematical framework designed to tell us how likely an event is to occur – and works well for many everyday situations. For example, it describes the

Underneath a temple in the ancient ruined city of Taposiris Magna on the Egyptian coast, archaeologists uncovered a vast, spectacular tunnel that experts are referring to as a “geometric miracle”. During ongoing excavations and exploration of the temple, Kathleen Martinez of the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and colleagues uncovered the structure

Erosion isn’t a thing on the Moon like it is on Earth. With no atmosphere or tectonic plates, the lunar surface remains scarred with impact craters and covered in dust – dust that could hold clues to our lunar companion’s magnetic history. A team of scientists has just discovered some oddly reflective dust-covered boulders in

What we don’t know can still hurt us very much indeed. 2023’s climate is a testament to that fact. Climate scientists were always expecting last year to break heat records. One analysis predicted there was a 99 percent chance that 2023 would be the hottest year since records began. But the reality turned out to

WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman has taken another charge on its contract to build a module for NASA’s lunar Gateway, bringing its losses for the year on that program to $100 million. In its fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings release Jan. 25, the company disclosed a $42 million “unfavorable EAC [estimate at completion] adjustment”

Dense thickets of ghostly corals shelter myriads of unfamiliar sea creatures have been found covering a vast area of the deep Atlantic, breaking records to become the largest known deep sea reef. “It’s eye-opening – it’s breathtaking in scale,” says Scripps Institution of Oceanography marine biologist Stuart Sandin. We barely have a clue what these