By Richard Faragher If you are reading this and you don’t smoke, then your major risk factor for dying is probably your age. That’s because we have nearly eliminated mortality in early life, thanks to advances in science and engineering. But despite this progress, we still haven’t worked out how to eliminate the damaging effects of […]
Read More Scientists Adjust How Brains Control AgingBy Matt Williams On July 2nd, 1967, the U.S. Vela 3 and 4 satellites noticed something rather perplexing. Originally designed to monitor for nuclear weapons tests in space by looking for gamma radiation, these satellites picked up a series of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) coming from deep space. And while decades have passed since the “Vela Incident“, astronomers are still […]
Read More Physicists Have Created an Artificial Gamma Ray Burst in the LabBy Jay Bennett The Hypatia stone is only a few centimeters across, broken into pebble fragments, but it may very well be the most interesting rock in the world. Named for Hypatia of Alexandria, the first prominent Western woman astronomer and mathematician, the colorful rock was found in 1996 in western Egypt by Aly Barakat, […]
Read More ‘Hypatia’ Stone Contains Compounds Not Found in the Solar SystemIN BRIEF Using data collected from their network of telescopes, the Event Horizons Telescope team hopes to produce the first ever image of a black hole in 2018. FIRST LOOK AT A BLACK HOLE Within the next 12 months, astrophysicists believe they’ll be able to do something that’s never been done before, and it could […]
Read More This Year, We’ll See a Black Hole for the First TimeBy Alex Acks I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy almost as long as I’ve been able to read, and I’m normally very good at suspending my disbelief. Unfortunately, seven years of university schooling and two degrees have now placed some suspension limits on certain areas—namely geology, landforms, and maps. I tend to notice little things like […]
Read More The Science of Desert PlanetsBy Mara Johnson-Groh The space high above Earth may seem empty, but it’s a carnival packed with magnetic field lines and high-energy particles. This region is known as the magnetosphere and, every day, charged particles put on a show as they dart and dive through it. Like tiny tightrope walkers, the high-energy electrons follow the […]
Read More NASA Studies the MagnetosphereRoads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts injected specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, which caused it to give off a dim light for nearly four hours. This could solve lots of problems. The chemical involved, which […]
Read More Living Plant LightsBy David Plotz Being an astronaut is not all zero-gravity gymnastics and big blue marble flyovers. There’s also all the time spent repairing the urine collector and hunting for lost screws. Scott Kelly’s delightful new memoir, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, chronicles the mundane, frustrating, and surprisingly funny reality of life on the […]
Read More Scott Kelly: An Astronaut’s Exit InterviewBy Josh Gabbatiss An international team of physicists has “stumbled upon” an entirely new material, which they have called “Weyl-Kondo semimetal”. The “semimetal” belongs to a category of substances known as “quantum materials”. Quantum materials have various quirky properties, some of which could contribute to future technological innovations like quantum computing – regarded by many […]
Read More Scientists Have Accidentally Discovered a New Material
