Are you sick of nature? Always doing beautiful things at inconvenient times? Well, a Japanese satellite may be just the thing for you. Rather than forcing you to wait for one of Earth’s 22 or so natural annual meteor showers, it discharges an artificial one, on command. Well, in theory, anyway. But we’re about to find
The future of coffee production is looking darker than the contents of your morning cup of joe. A deadly combination of climate change, disease and deforestation is gradually pushing a multi-billion-dollar industry right to the edge. Researchers at UK’s Kew Gardens have calculated that out of the 124 coffee species known to science, nearly 60
Pictured here is a man injecting sperm into a capillary tube. (Photo: Getty Images)Getty Here is one way to make your back pain seem less of a problem. Create another medical problem. The Irish Medical Journal included a case report of a 33-year-old male patient who was suffering from continuing severe lower back pain after lifting a
Updated 11:00 p.m. Eastern. WASHINGTON — Less than a week after laying off 10 percent of its employees, SpaceX said Jan. 16 that it plans to shift work on at least prototypes of its next-generation launch system from Los Angeles to Texas. In a statement, SpaceX said it was now planning to build prototypes of
In just a few days, the Moon will turn a shade of rust and loom larger in the sky than usual in a relatively rare astronomical event. For the half of the planet fortunate enough to see it, it’s a chance to see two fascinating spectacles combined in what’s known as a ‘super blood moon’
Fifty years after Harvard Medical School defined brain death, a new report commemorates the concept and raises new and lasting questions about what it means to be dead as well as implications for organ transplantation. “Is death defined in terms of the biological failure of the organism to maintain integrated functioning? Can death be declared
WASHINGTON — Aircraft-tracking startup Aireon is borrowing $200 million through a Deutsche Bank-led group of investor funds, the company said Jan. 16. Aireon said it signed the credit facility Dec. 21, and that it used the new funds to pay satellite operator Iridium $35 million before the end of 2018 for hosting its sensor payloads
China says it has grown the first plants on the Moon as part of its historic mission to the far side. China landed its Chang’e 4 spacecraft on the Moon’s far side on January 3, becoming the first nation to do so. It has now achieved another first: a seed successfully germinating while on the
It’s been compared to crop circles, or the strange handiwork of aliens. Others say it looks like the Moon, if it somehow materialised in the chilly waters of the Presumpscot River. But this massive churning formation in the city of Westbrook, Maine isn’t evidence of something from outer space, but rather a bizarre and brilliant
GENEVA (Reuters) – A proposed 100-km particle accelerator under Geneva has joined an international quest to develop the successor to the Large Hadron Collider to help unlock humankind’s knowledge of matter. FILE PHOTO: A general view of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment during a media visit at the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in
Muri Lagoon from an aerial or bird’s eye view in Rarotonga the main island in the Cook Islands on a perfect day Credit: GettyGetty A string of recent reports came out highlighting just how significant the global ocean warming has become. Its the equivalent heating of detonating 3 to 5 nuclear bombs in the ocean
WASHINGTON — Astranis, a startup designing small geostationary satellites for internet connectivity, has signed an Alaskan telecommunications provider as its first customer. Pacific Dataport Inc. of Anchorage, Alaska, will lease capacity on the satellite through a long-term contract worth “tens of millions of dollars,” Astranis CEO John Gedmark said in an interview. Astranis will own
A frog by the name of Romeo, thought to be the last of his species, is no longer fortune’s fool. Defying the stars, this lonely amphibious bachelor has at last found his Juliet. Known as the world’s loneliest frog, for ten years Romeo has burned, he has pined, but he has not perished. His story
Will there be no end to people trying to muck up the night sky? Around this time last year it was a disco ball sent into low-Earth orbit. Now a Russian startup has had the colossally dense idea of sticking beaming billboards up there, to shine advertising back down to Earth. Putting aside the fact
We’ve had chances. Lots of chances. But humanity has a history of squandering chances, despite everything we know about climate change. Despite everything riding on us addressing it. As it happens, the odds may still be in our favour. A new study estimates there’s a 64 percent chance that peak global average temperature rise can
Will your sleep time affect how soon atherosclerosis develop? (Photo: Getty Images)Getty If you don’t realize that not getting enough sleep may lead to health problems, then you don’t know jack. You also may not know JACC, which stands for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. JACC is the journal that just published
WASHINGTON — A commercial space bill that fell just short of passage last year will be reintroduced this year to serve as the starting point for further discussions, a key senator said Jan. 15. Speaking at a Space Transportation Association Event here, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he hoped to win passage of a new
Some of the Universe’s deepest secrets are locked up so tight, a whole new kind of subatomic cataclysm is needed to tear them free. To unleash those kinds of forces, European physicists want to build a particle accelerator to rival anything we’ve seen, one that will make the famous 27 kilometre (16.7 mile) Large Hadron
It was promising to be an uncharacteristically warm winter day in Boston. The temperature on 15 January 1919, had soared to 40 degrees Fahrenheit from 2 degrees (4 degrees Celsius from -16) earlier in the week, prompting many downtown workers to head outdoors. Shortly after noon in the city’s bustling North End, as Model T
The peculiar movement of gas at the galactic centre could be the smoking gun that finally leads astronomers to the most elusive type of black hole – the middleweight. Black holes are pretty hard to find unless they’re actively feeding (or colliding), since they don’t emit any electromagnetic radiation (except perhaps for Hawking radiation, which,