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About 100 years ago, we began to truly understand the nature of the Universe for the very first time. The grand spirals and ellipticals in the sky were determined to be enormous, distant collections of stars well outside of the Milky Way: galaxies unto themselves. They were receding away from us, with more distant galaxies

Are you ready for a little Ingenuity? NASA will this week make its first attempt at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. A tiny helicopter called Ingenuity is currently on the Martian surface, having been deposited there by the Perseverance rover, which landed on in the Jezero Crater on February 18. It

NASA released a stunning image of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on the surface of the planet as the Perseverance rover moved away from it. For some people on social media, however, the arc feature in the background of the photo caught their eye. Is it a rainbow? While that is an intriguing question, here’s an

Only by observing it can we know what the Universe is like. The European Space Agency’s space-based Gaia mission has mapped out the three-dimensional positions … [+] and locations of more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy: the most of all-time. However, even with all the features that observatories like this can

Each Monday I pick out the northern hemisphere’s celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead, but be sure to check my main feed for more in-depth articles on stargazing, astronomy, eclipses and more.  What To Watch For In The Night Sky This Week: April 5-11, 2021 It’s International Dark Sky Week, which for the

The name Kalahari is derived from the Tswana word Kgala, meaning ‘great thirst’. And today the climate at Ga-Mohana, a rock-shelter site in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, is semi-arid, with little, very seasonal rainfall. However, ancient proof of abundant water on the landscape is evident from the abundant tufa formations (a variety of limestone

It’s clear that agrochemicals that are highly lethal to insects and weeds can also be extremely dangerous to people. And much of that human harm involves self-poisoning. Most deaths by suicide are carried out impulsively, using means that are close at hand. And most survivors of suicide attempts don’t try again. Thus, reduced availability of

In almost exactly three years there be will a dramatic total solar eclipse across North America. On Monday, April 8, 2024, those in Mazatlán, Mexico will experience totality—when the Moon blocks the Sun—for a whopping 4 minutes 26 seconds. A moonshadow will then move across the continent enveloping in darkness those in Dallas, Indianapolis, Cleveland,

On the morning of Monday April 1, 1974, the residents of Sitka, Alaska, noted something strange in the familiar sight of Mount Edgecumbe, a dormant volcano located at the southern end of Kruzof Island, Alaska. A menacing plume of black smoke was rising from the crater! Concerned residents called the police and firefighters and the

The brain takes in and processes information fast. Well, pretty fast. But like everything else in life, ‘fast’ is relative. By the time you are finished reading this, you will be able to do an easy experiment that will show you how your brain struggles to process information that arrives too fast. The speed with

Are we alone? It’s the ultimate question, but it’s also an impossible task. “We could find signs of life, but it’s not going to be the definitive proof that we were hoping for when we started out on this journey.” So says Professor Sarah Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the pioneering planetary scientist,

The Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund is now over a year old. It was launched on March 13, 2020 to raise money for the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners, including the African Union and the World Food Programme, as they respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. This fund is particularly useful for speedy pandemic response because

In the late 1990s, about 5% of the approximately 4000 bachelor’s degrees in physics per year were earned by Black Americans. Since that time, the representation of Black scientists earning bachelor’s degrees has increased in many fields, including earth sciences, computer science, chemistry, and engineering. But even as undergraduate interest in physics has increased —

One of the biggest mysteries of modern physics is the question of why we don’t see as much antimatter in the universe as ordinary matter. A possible explanation is that antimatter is simply different from ordinary matter in an unknown, but important, way. To explore this possibility, scientists have trapped antimatter to study its properties. However, making precise

In a small study of pregnant women, researchers found that exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals commonly found in plastics and products like lipstick, perfumes and lotions – also known as bisphenols (BPA) and phthalates – could contribute to postpartum depression. The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, looked at 139 pregnant women

About a year ago, as the world experienced the deadly “first wave” associated with the coronavirus pandemic, many struggled to separate accurate from inaccurate information. While many well-meaning people — scientists and non-scientists alike — attempted to share what was known to be true, what was being investigated, what likely and unlikely hypotheses were, and

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is preparing for its first flight sometime in the coming week. It will be the first powered flight on Mars, and in honor of the occasion, the little helicopter is carrying a good luck charm. Taped to a cable under the solar panel that sits above Ingenuity’s two pairs of rotor

After a rough couple of weeks that saw one severe weather outbreak after another, the United States will begin the month of April with an unusual weather pattern: calmness. Agreeable conditions will descend upon the country this Easter weekend and bring calm during a period when serenity is usually in short supply. A deep trough

If you take enough mass and compress it into a small enough volume of space, you’ll inevitably form a black hole. Any mass in the Universe will curve the fabric of spacetime around it, and the more severely curved that spacetime fabric is, the more difficult it is to escape from that mass’s gravitational pull.

The strange binary Asteroid 65803 Didymos-Dimorphos could be held together like dust bunnies, says an international team of researchers that includes queen rock guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May.  The study, published in the journal Icarus, details how the same forces responsible for building dust bunnies under our beds may be responsible for holding the asteroid