Laika ac / Wikimedia Commons While NASA’s Apollo 11 mission is still remembered today for putting a man on the Moon in 1969, the Soviet Union put humanity’s first uncrewed spacecraft on lunar soil three years earlier. A Russian-born space communicator announced last November that he found
A mixed-species section of the Green Great Wall – Credit: 中国新闻网 CC 3.0. BY China’s multi-decade long, successful effort to plant a ring of trees around one of the world’s most hostile deserts has sprouted an unexpected benefit to humanity. Along with protecting the nation’s grasslands and agriculture from the spreading sands of the dismal
A newly discovered prehistoric shark, Bavariscyllium, is rewriting our understanding of shark evolution. This fascinating creature, which roamed the seas about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period, has recently been studied in detail by an international team led by Sebastian Stumpf from the Natural History Museum Vienna and the University of Vienna. Their
Imagine trying to photograph wind. That’s similar to what NASA engineers dealt with during a recent effort to study how air moves around planes, rockets, and other kinds of aerospace vehicles. Air is invisible, but our understanding of how it flows is crucial for building better, safer aircraft. For 80 years, researchers used a technique
On stone arrowheads left in a South African rock shelter, researchers found 60,000-year-old traces of plant poison. A team working in Sweden and South Africa analyzed quartz tips from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A residue on one artifact can be a fluke, but repeats on older and newer arrowheads are
NIAMEY, Niger — At a remote and barren Sahara desert site in Niger, scientists have unearthed fossils of a new species of Spinosaurus, among the biggest of the meat-eating dinosaurs, notable for its large blade-shaped head crest and jaws bearing interlocking teeth for snaring slippery fish. It prowled a forested inland environment and strode into
Astronomers have discovered a chemical called methanimine in the core of a pre-stellar cloud 554 light-years away, a finding that could offer vital clues about how life might begin on other planets. This organic molecule, found in the cold gas and dust of the L1544 cloud, suggests that chemical processes essential to life are already
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has delivered extraordinary video footage showing towering ice mountains on Pluto’s moon Nix. These ice peaks, some rising as high as 11,000 feet, are made of pure water ice and behave like rock due to the intense cold. The footage from New Horizons provides unprecedented details of Nix, a moon that
Solar flares often disrupt Earth’s upper atmosphere and help power stunning auroras. Now, scientists suggest those same bursts of solar energy might also influence earthquakes. When a solar flare erupts toward our planet, it can subtly rearrange charged particles in Earth’s ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere filled with electrically charged gas. In a
As humanity pushes the boundaries of space exploration, one of the key challenges is how to access resources from distant asteroids. A recent study published in npj Microgravity has revealed groundbreaking findings on how microbes, specifically bacteria and fungi, might be harnessed for resource extraction in space. This experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS)