Enlarge (credit: Scott Weady ) You would think that understanding something as common as melting ice would be relatively easy. But water is a peculiar substance, and that makes it very hard to predict how ice will melt. A lot of that unpredictability has been attributed in order to water flowing around the ice (as […]
Enlarge / China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft flies above Mars. (credit: CNSA) China celebrates the start of a new year on Tuesday—it will be the Year of the Tiger—and on the particular eve of the holiday, the Chinese space program sent a special message from the red planet. The country’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which has been in orbit […]
Enlarge (credit: Kryssia Campos | Getty Images) Twenty-four years ago, Briana Pobiner reached into the north Kenyan soil and put her hands on bones that had last been touched 1.5 million years ago. Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist, was digging up ancient animal bones and searching for cuts and dents, signs that they had been butchered by […]
Enlarge / (L-R) Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the President, Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dawn O’Connell, assistant HHS secretary for preparedness and […]
Enlarge / The string of interrupted bright patches moving from top left to lower right is a channel filled with salt deposits. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) By now, there’s plenty of evidence that Mars had a watery past, and more data is coming in all the time. But that evidence doesn’t necessarily give us a complete picture of Mars’ […]
Crews working on an Ares launch tower in February 2010 at the Kennedy Space Center, even after Constellation had been informally cancelled. This would eventually become Mobile Launcher-1. (credit: Lee Hutchinson) The Space Launch System rocket that NASA has been building for more than a decade now—and which may finally launch for the first time […]
Enlarge / OrienSpace is planning a series of rockets, from Gravity 1 through Gravity 4, over the coming decade. (credit: OrienSpace) Welcome to Edition 4.30 of the Rocket Report! There is plenty to discuss this week with NASA significantly expanding its support for the development of commercial rockets and a spicy new rocket tax proposal […]
Enlarge / Virtual worlds might be digital, but they can be as real and meaningful as our physical world, philosopher David Chalmers argues in his new book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | David Chalmers) There’s a famous scene in The Matrix where Neo goes to see The […]
Enlarge / (left) Biologists have named a newly discovered species of branching worm, Ramisyllis kingghidorahin, after Godzilla’s nemesis. (right) Fragment of one specimen of the branching worm. (credit: M.T. Aguado) In the 2019 blockbuster film, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, everyone’s favorite kaiju, Godzilla, battled another titan named King Ghidorah, a monster notable for its […]
Enlarge / A vial of the current Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Ivan Romano) The first doses of omicron-specific COVID-19 vaccines went into the arms of clinical trial participants this week. This takes place just as the towering wave of cases from the ultratransmissible coronavirus variant appears to be cresting in the US and […]