Enlarge / The James Webb Space Telescope lifts off from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket on December 25. (credit: ESA – S. Corvaja) Welcome to Edition 4.27 of the Rocket Report! And after two weeks away, the Rocket Report is back. I’d like to say I’m tanned, rested, and ready, but hey, one […]
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of the Ramjet propulsion system proposed in 1960 by physicist Robert W. Bussard (credit: NASA) In Poul Anderson’s 1970 novel Tau Zero, a starship crew seeks to travel to the star Beta Virginis in hopes of colonizing a new planet. The ship’s mode of propulsion was a so-called “Bussard ramjet,” an […]
Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks during a press conference on December 20, 2021 at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. (credit: Getty| Fabrice Coffrini) The World Health Organization on Thursday pushed back on the consistent chatter that the ultratransmissible omicron coronavirus is “mild,” noting that the variant is, in fact, […]
Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson co-star in director Roland Emmerich’s latest film, Moonfall. Hello, police? I’d like to report a murder—the murder of credible science on the altar of entertainment, as evidenced in the latest trailer for Moonfall. It’s the latest epic disaster blockbuster from director Roland Emmerich, in which the Earth’s existence is threatened by […]
Enlarge (credit: Surapong Thammabuht / EyeEm) Just as the pandemic hit, Christina Islas Lynggaard—a postdoc researcher at the University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute—sat in her apartment surrounded by vacuums and filters. She tested them, eventually landing on a water vacuum, which was, for her purposes, pretty good. The rest didn’t quite make the cut—they had […]
Enlarge / Change in government space budgets over time. (credit: Euroconsult) Nations around the world spent a total of $92 billion on the “space sector” in 2021, the market intelligence firm Euroconsult reports. This represents an 8 percent increase in spending from the year 2020. In the latest edition of the report “Government Space Programs,” […]
Enlarge / Scientists have used the data from Gaia to track the location and motion of stars in our galaxy. (credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC) Galaxies like the Milky Way are thought to have been built through a series of mergers, drawing in smaller galaxies and clusters of stars and making these foreign stars their own. In some […]
Enlarge / The remains of an individual buried in an Augustinian friary, excavated in 2016 on the University of Cambridge’s New Museums site. There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one […]
Enlarge / The remains of an individual buried in an Augustinian friary, excavated in 2016 on the University of Cambridge’s New Museums site. There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one […]
Enlarge / CDC Director Rochelle Walensky testifies during a Senate committee hearing in July 2021. (credit: Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images) The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday offered mixed messages on the use of at-home rapid tests as the agency continued to defend its controversial recommendation that people with COVID-19 can leave isolation […]