Enlarge / Image from a 2018 observational study of ballooning in large spiders depicting a crab spider just as it is about to take off. (credit: Cho, M. et al., 2018/CC BY-SA 4.0) In 1832, Charles Darwin witnessed hundreds of ballooning spiders landing on the HMS Beagle while some 60 miles offshore. Ballooning is a […]
Enlarge / Train attendants holding signs welcome a medical team from Tianjin at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station on April 3, 2022 in Tianjin, China. A team of medical workers from Tianjin arrived in Shanghai on Sunday to support the city’s fight against COVID-19 epidemic. Health officials in China have dispatched more than 38,000 health workers […]
Enlarge / Winterizing every wind turbine in Texas makes economic sense. So why wasn’t it done? (credit: Ted Horowitz / Getty Images) Just over a year ago, a cold front moved into Texas and stayed there. As demand for electricity soared, various generating sources fell off line, leading to extensive grid failures that left customers […]
Enlarge (credit: Wagner et al. 2022) With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially […]
Enlarge (credit: Wagner et al. 2022) With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially […]
Enlarge / Wright Mons, at center. Note the lumpy nature of its flanks extends to other nearby areas. (credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute) When we look at the features on other bodies in our Solar System, there are often obvious analogs much closer to home. For example, sets of parallel ridges on […]
Enlarge / Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin is photographed in October, 2018, after the launch failure of a Soyuz-FG rocket. (credit: Alexei Filippov/TASS via Getty Images) For a few weeks now, the chief of Russia’s spaceflight activities has said that the United States and its Western allies must end sanctions on his country by March 31, […]
Enlarge / Anachronistic baroque painting of the pivotal Battle of Actium by Laureys a Castro, 1672. (credit: Public domain) Historians widely consider the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE to be the decisive event that led to Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The couple committed suicide—Antony by stabbing himself in the stomach, and Cleopatra […]
Enlarge (credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii) The nearby volcano blackened the sky and swallowed the city in clouds of ash; centuries later, robot dogs now prowl the ruins, guarding the city’s dead against the ravages of time. That’s not a movie plot. It’s what’s actually happening at the 2, 000-year-old Roman ruins of Pompeii, in […]
Enlarge / NASA’s large rocket will undergo a dress rehearsal this weekend. (credit: NASA) After two weeks of preparatory work on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, NASA is ready to put its large new rocket and its complex plumbing system to the test. This will be the final major rehearsal before the space […]