NASA experts are raising alarms about the growing threat posed by near-Earth asteroids, with some of these objects having the potential to cause devastating damage to cities. While some large asteroids are monitored and their movements tracked, there’s a significant concern over the undetected mid-sized asteroids that could strike without warning. These “city killers,” as
Summary: For over a century, the cornerstone of psychology has been the Pavlovian idea that we learn through repetition—the more a bell rings before food, the stronger the association. However, a groundbreaking study is upending this 100-year-old assumption. Researchers discovered that the brain actually learns more efficiently when rewards are rare and spaced far apart.
At a news conference on Thursday, NASA released a report of findings from the Program Investigation Team examining the Boeing CST-100 Starliner Crewed Flight Test as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. “The Boeing Starliner spacecraft has faced challenges throughout its uncrewed and most recent crewed missions. While Boeing built Starliner, NASA accepted it and launched two astronauts to space.
It is the most distant and primitive object ever visited by a spacecraft from Earth: now researchers say they have fresh insights into how the ultra-red, 4bn-year-old body known as Arrokoth came to have its distinctive snowman-like shape. Arrokoth sits in the Kuiper belt, a vast, thick ring of icy objects that lies beyond the
Inverse design strategies Inverse design used an AGA to determine 2D microlattice patterns, defined by spatially varying triangular voids, for targeted 3D geometries (Extended Data Fig. 1). The optimization process used the Python framework DEAP, a common package for the deployment of AGAs. Discretization of the surface of the target geometry into a finite number
Japan is preparing to launch the world’s first wooden satellite, LignoSat, later this year. Made from magnolia wood, the satellite aims to tackle the growing issue of space pollution, particularly the aluminum particles released when traditional metal satellites burn up during re-entry. Developed by researchers from Kyoto University in collaboration with Sumitomo Forestry, the LignoSat
On February 19, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket fell back toward Earth in an uncontrolled reentry, producing a massive fireball in the skies over Europe. On its way down, the rocket came near a lidar station in Saxony, Germany, where a team of researchers was able to use the remote-sensing instrument to measure the effect
SpaceX can land its rockets in The Bahamas again — and will do so very soon, if all goes according to plan. On Tuesday (Feb. 17), the Civil Aviation Authority of The Bahamas (CAA-B) approved the resumption of Falcon 9 first-stage touchdowns in the nation’s waters. The decision ended a lengthy review spurred by a
Credit: Olga Yastremska/Alamy Calling nanoscientists: your field needs you to try to replicate a landmark finding that quantum dots can act as biosensors inside living cells. As part of the first large-scale effort in the physical sciences to tackle the reproducibility crisis, researchers in France and the Netherlands are offering funds and resources in exchange
For more than two centuries, paleontologists have studied a group of plant eating dinosaurs known as Iguanodontia. These dinosaurs were first identified in the early 1800s and are famous for their beaked mouths and strong hind legs. Now, that long established branch of the dinosaur family tree has gained a surprising new member. Researchers have