Enlarge / This photo shows the Australian Navy’s HMAS Adelaide docked at Vuna Wharf in the Tongan capital of Nukualofa on January 26, 2022. The Adelaide delivered aid following the January 15 eruption of the nearby Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano. (credit: Getty | Mary Lyn Fonua) The archipelago nation of Tonga went into lockdown […]
Enlarge / False-color image of a T-cell (orange) latching on to a cell in preparation for killing it. (credit: Getty Images) From the start, the omicron variant had people worried because its version of the spike protein carried mutations in many of the sites that are recognized by antibodies. This meant that antibodies generated to […]
Enlarge / The Space Launch System main engines are seen in High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 10, 2022. (credit: NASA) NASA officials on Wednesday said the agency would conduct an initial rollout of the massive Space Launch System rocket sometime in March, a multi-week delay […]
Enlarge / Joe Rogan on July 9, 2021, in Las Vegas, NV. (credit: Getty | Icon Sportswire ) Long before the pandemic took the lives of more than 5. 6 million people and created a lucrative market for COVID grifts, misinformation, and snake oil, there was Goop. The aspirational lifestyle brand and its lustrous “contextual […]
Enlarge / Texas Governor Greg Abbott, center, during a press conference at the Capitol on June 8, 2021, in Austin, Texas. He signed two bills into law to reform the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. (credit: Montinique Monroe/Getty Images) Nearly one year ago, the state of Texas suffered a debilitating power outage to its independent […]
Enlarge / Solar power and habitat preservation are likely to conflict, but only in some areas. (credit: Zhi Hao ) Compared to fossil fuel plants, renewable energy facilities cover a lot of ground. That ground can be put to additional uses; many wind farms are also farms, and even solar plants can work well with […]
Launch of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation satellite on January 31. [credit: SpaceX ] For a few days there, it sure seemed like a previously flown Falcon 9 rocket carrying a satellite for the Italian air force would never get off the ground from Florida. On January 27 and 28, poor weather scrubbed the rocket’s launch […]
Enlarge / (l-r) A quantum gas appears first as an elongated rod. As it rotates, it becomes helical, then it breaks up into blobs, each a swirling mass. Between the blobs tiny vortices appear in a regularly repeating series. (credit: MIT/Nature) Physicists at MIT have succeeded in getting “quantum tornadoes” to form in clouds of […]
Enlarge / A child getting a vaccination on February 19, 2021, in Bonn, Germany. (credit: Getty | Ute Grabowsky) The Food and Drug Administration may be reconsidering its criteria for authorizing COVID-19 vaccine doses for children under age five, according to Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and a current board member of vaccine-maker Pfizer. […]
Enlarge (credit: NOAA ) Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted on January 15 in one of the largest volcanic events in decades, and research in recent years indicates that the volcano produces similar violent eruptions about once every millennium. But some of the deadliest and most explosive eruptions in the last two centuries have come from volcanoes […]