Scientists have recreated Titan-like conditions in a lab, and found that organic molecules from Titan’s atmosphere could be forming rings of alien crystals around the methane lakes that dot the Saturn moon’s surface. Previously, the team led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had discovered two of these ‘molecular minerals’. Now they’ve discovered a
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You might think that plastic pollution on land and sea is old news by now, but it’s taken on a new form we’ve only just noticed: Researchers have identified a crust of plastic particles building up on shoreline rocks. This ‘plasticrust’ isn’t just a worrying symbol of the garbage piling up in our oceans. The coating
Chernobyl has become a byword for catastrophe. The 1986 nuclear disaster, recently brought back into the public eye by the hugely popular TV show of the same name, caused thousands of cancers, turned a once populous area into a ghost city, and resulted in the setting up of an exclusion zone 2600 km² in size.
WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted off early June 25 carrying two dozen small satellites on a mission to demonstrate the rocket’s capabilities for the U.S. Air Force. The Falcon Heavy lifted off at 2:30 a.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The launch took place three hours into a
Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin The NHC’s five-day tropical weather outlook, issued the evening of June 24, 2019. Dennis Mersereau The National Hurricane Center gives a disturbance in the eastern Pacific Ocean a 70 percent chance of developing into a tropical depression or a tropical storm this week. Models don’t do
Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, said his rocket company’s toughest mission yet has arrived – and you can watch it live online below. Sometime between 23:30 ET on Monday (03:30 UTC on Tuesday) and 02:30 ET (06:30 UTC) on Tuesday, a Falcon Heavy rocket will try to lift off from Cape Canaveral,
Magic: The Gathering, the card game where you build your own deck from over 19,000 unique cards and then battle this deck against other people, is not what you would call simple. But a pre-print paper first published in March turns this already complex game up a notch, showing that a specific set of cards
HELSINKI — A Long March 3B lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 2:09 p.m. Eastern Monday, sending a Beidou satellite toward an inclined geosynchronous orbit. The launch occurred within a window indicated by the issuance of an airspace closure notice days earlier. Spectator footage provided the first indication of
A Navy blue CDS, which also comes in cinnamon brown, rose red and jet black. Mi Terro Plastic in the ocean needs to hit the road, take a trip, get out of town. A group of students at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business have created a travel bag made of cork and recycled
Last week, Curiosity made its strongest detection of methane on Mars yet. Its laser spectrometer instrument registered a methane spike of 21 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) in the Gale Crater, a region the rover has been exploring since it landed in 2012. Generally, methane presence on Mars has a global average of 10
WASHINGTON — SpaceX is set to perform the third flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket June 24, a mission that will effectively be a test flight demonstrating the capabilities of the vehicle for the U.S. Air Force. The Falcon Heavy is scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 11:30 p.m.
Parts of Colorado received almost 2 feet of snow at the beginning of summer. It’s not that I am psychic or anything, but I bet someone on Twitter used that to dismiss climate change. Such a scientifically illiterate statement is why science communication is so important. This past week meteorologists from around the world participated in a
It’s called the ‘White City’: a fabled settlement hidden deep in the lush rainforests of Honduras, said to be all that now remains of a mysterious civilisation that existed in Central America long before the Europeans came. But this lost city has its non-believers. For much of the last century, doubts have swirled around disputed
On 24 June 2019, NASA is sending an atomic clock into space. Not just any old atomic clock, either. It’s up to 50 times more accurate than the atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites, its precision only changing by one second every 10 million years. It’s only the size of a toaster, yet it could revolutionise
Underneath the salty waters of the North Atlantic ocean, geologists have discovered a giant aquifer of freshwater, hidden from view just off the US coast. While the vast size of this massive cache is surprising, it’s not entirely unexpected. Signals of the water first showed up in the 1970s, but until now, nobody suspected that
The data from all those Instagram pictures you’re posting needs to be stored somewhere, and the increasing amount of digital information we’re all producing means we also need an increasing amount of energy just to store it all. Now scientists have come up with a working example of what’s known as universal memory, a brand
In the coming weeks, the Defense Department, the Air Force and the Army will have new secretaries. WASHINGTON — Within the span of two days last week at the Pentagon, three top officials who played key roles in DoD space organization, policy and procurement stepped down from their posts. Just hours after news of the
Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Boaty McBoatface Povl Abrahamsen, British Antarctic Survey Boaty McBoatface, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) used for polar science research, made an important discovery while deployed in the Southern Ocean in April 2017. Over the course of three days, the AUV traveled over 100 miles across underwater valleys to measure seawater temperature,
In the pitch black waters 759 meters (2500 feet) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a thin, undulating arm emerges from the gloom. Suddenly, it splits, and what was a lone, curious appendage is a writhing bouquet of tentacles until, finally, an honest-to-God giant squid blooms from the darkness and attacks. Then, the
WASHINGTON — NASA issued a call for proposals for commercial modules that could be added to the International Space Station, although one industry executive warns that such facilities may not be as lucrative as NASA believes. NASA issued a call for proposals June 21 for “commercial destination development in low Earth orbit using the International