The Vera C. Rubin Observatory spent the night staring at the dark cosmos, alerting astronomers of ongoing changes in the skies in real-time. The observatory fired off its first wave of notifications from its new alert system on Tuesday night, sending 800,000 alerts to astronomers’ computers around the world. The Alert Production Pipeline, a software
It’s a scene in so many space movies: The actor looks out through a window at the vacuum of space, and watches as a crack slowly forms and stretches across the screen. This week, Space.com surfaced some interview footage (embedded below) with the Chinese taikonauts who lived through something almost as dramatic. The incident occurred
We’ve been obsessed with our origins ever since we realized just how ancient Earth really is. We’ve stared at billion-year-old rocks, some with microbes still inside, and run countless computer simulations trying to crack the code. Most hypotheses zoom in on the simplest steps, the basic reactions needed to form life’s fundamental molecules. But that
NASA‘s Curiosity rover has snapped stunning new photos of giant “spiderwebs” zig-zagging across the surface of Mars. One of these images has revealed never-before-seen, egg-like spheroids covering the sprawling structures — and scientists are struggling to explain them. Over the last 8 months, Curiosity has been closely examining a series of interconnected rocky ridges, dubbed
NASA recently to the International Space Station (ISS) a month early, citing a medical issue with one of the astronauts. The space agency just revealed that the . This was the first medical evacuation in the history of the ISS. NASA wrote a statement saying that the astronaut experienced an unknown medical event on January
NASA has replaced two bigwigs in its human spaceflight program, just a week after releasing a report that found serious fault with how the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner astronaut taxi was handled. The agency announced today (Feb. 26) that Joel Montalbano and Dana Hutcherson will serve as acting associate administrator for the Space
Ostrich eggs are huge. Big enough, in fact, for ancient humans to use them as primitive writing surfaces for showcasing their mathematical prowess, according to a new study. The paper, published recently in PLOS One, describes an investigation of 112 ostrich eggshell fragments dating back more than 60,000 years from three archaeological sites in southern
Scientists have captured a beautiful image in unprecedented detail of the vast Milky Way galaxy, of which our own solar system is a part. The stunning image is the largest ever obtained by the specialist telescope in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) radio telescope, according to the group behind the project. The
Faded white rings surrounding rusting barrels in the San Pedro Basin have been linked to leaks of caustic waste reacting with surrounding mud. The findings show that material discarded between the 1930s and early 1970s is still reshaping deep habitats today. Researchers have now traced those halos to highly alkaline material that continues to alter
Light does not “think” in any human sense. Still, under the right conditions, it can behave in a way that looks uncannily like a memory system. In a new international study, researchers report that identical photons moving through an optical circuit can spontaneously mimic a Hopfield Network, a classic mathematical model used to describe associative