Earth & Life
Astronauts who walked on the moon reported that the dust tracked back into the…
Every astronaut who walked on the moon and returned to a pressurised cabin noticed a smell.
Science & Engineering
The Mars rovers carry no clocks set to Earth time, so the engineers driving them…
NASA's Mars rovers run on a 24-hour-39-minute Martian sol, and for the first 90 sols of every mission the engineers at JPL shift their entire lives to match, producing a jet lag no human had experienced before.
Military Space
A US Navy satellite launched in 1964 can still be heard by amateur radio observers
Transit 5B-5 failed as a navigation satellite after weeks, but observers continue to report its solar-powered telemetry signal. It is uncontrolled, not an active Navy service.
Space & Missions
The Senate just installed a deputy administrator who thinks NASA's job is beating…
Matt Anderson, the retired Air Force colonel who told senators that beating China to the moon should be NASA's top priority, was confirmed Monday as the…
Universe
Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth…
When Scott Kelly returned from 340 days aboard the International Space Station, NASA's twin study revealed that roughly seven percent of his gene expression had shifted in ways that never fully returned to baseline.
Science & Engineering
Octopuses have nine brains, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, with roughly…
An octopus carries roughly 500 million neurons, two-thirds of them distributed down eight arms that taste, decide and react in under 100 milliseconds without consulting the central brain. The result is nine semi-independent minds, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, all working in negotiation.
Universe
The bacteria living in and on your body outnumber your own cells, which means that…
By raw cell count, the human body is a minority partner in its own biology — and the precise composition of that partnership depends, in part, on how recently you've emptied your colon.
Space & Missions
In April 2019 the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface…
In April 2019, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades inside a "lunar library". Later…
Psychology
Radioactive iron from an ancient stellar explosion has been found in…
A team led by researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has found traces of iron-60 in Antarctic ice cores dating back between 40,000 and…
Human Behaviour
Technology spent 15 years removing every small resistance from your day
Over roughly the past decade and a half, the dominant design logic of consumer technology has been to remove friction.
Science & Engineering
In 2007 the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the open vacuum of…
In September 2007, the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the open vacuum of space for 10 days aboard the FOTON-M3 mission.
Universe
Japan sits on the intersection of four tectonic plates and experiences roughly…
Japan endures roughly 1,500 earthquakes a year on the seam of four tectonic plates, and the Tokyo Skytree's 634-meter answer to that problem is not stiffness but a deliberate, controlled sway borrowed from a building technique that is more than a thousand years old.
Science & Engineering
The Antikythera mechanism was recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901 with at…
Recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera mechanism used hand-cut bronze gears to predict eclipses and planetary positions, and nothing of comparable complexity appears in the archaeological record for the next fourteen centuries.
Universe
China's Chang'e 5 mission returned lunar rocks dated to 2 billion years old
On December 17, 2020, a small Chinese spacecraft called Chang'e 5 landed in the Pacific Ocean carrying approximately 1.731 kilograms of lunar material.
Science & Engineering
About 60 percent of the human body's mass is water, but a much more interesting…
The standard cultural framing of the human body tends to treat it as a self-contained biological unit composed of cells that are, in some sense, all human.
Science & Engineering
The Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on Earth's surface, sits about 36,000…
The Mariana Trench is, by every available measurement, the deepest point on the surface of the Earth.