Enlarge / A close-up view of Ingenuity on Mars, as seen by the Perseverance rover, in April. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) Back in early September the small Ingenuity helicopter that NASA sent to Mars along with the Determination rover made its 13th flight on the red planet. It was a technically demanding flight, traversing nearly 210 meters […]
Enlarge / 19 November 2021, Hamburg: A tray of prepared syringes for booster vaccinations with Moderna’s vaccine. (credit: Getty | Picture alliance ) The Food and Drug Administration has authorized booster doses of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for all people ages 18 plus up, the companies announced separately this morning. The boosters […]
Enlarge (credit: Degui Adil / Getty Images) It is often said that the difference between science and superstition is that science is reproducible. Unfortunately, many scientific papers aren’t, making them about as reliable as superstition. Since the mid-1600s , the output from a typical scientific study has been an essay-style journal article describing the results. […]
Enlarge / Launch of Vega VV20 on Nov. 16, 2021, from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. (credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace ) Welcome to Edition 4. 24 of the Rocket Report! This will be the last newsletter for the month of November, as I’ll be taking off next week for the Thanksgiving holiday. But the Rocket Report will […]
Enlarge / In this artist’s representation, Tetrapodophis amplectus glides through a tangle of branches from the conifer Duartenia araripensis that have fallen into the water, sharing this habitat with a water bug in the family Belostomatidae and small fish. (credit: Julius Csotonyi) The discovery of a rare Cretaceous fossil that could have been a missing […]
Real Water sold in jugs. (credit: FDA) At least 25 people in two states were likely poisoned by toxic batches of the “Re2al Alkalized Water,” including five children who suffered acute liver failure and one person who died. That’s according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thursday, which lays […]
Enlarge / Hubble Space Telescope above Earth, photographed during STS-125, Servicing Mission 4, May 2009. (credit: NASA) Earlier this month, NASA announced that the scientific instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope had been left in safe mode after a series of problems with the timing signals that coordinate their activity. While NASA is still uncertain […]
Europa could harbor complex life, and we’ll have to take care to avoid any cross-contamination. (credit: Ted Stryk/NASA) The Beresheet crash landed on Earth’s Moon in 2019. Part of the ill-fated Israeli lunar lander’s payload was a bunch of tardigrades, or “water bears.” These organisms are under a millimeter long and can survive extreme cold […]
Enlarge / In TerraPower’s design, the nuclear reactor is separated from the power generation process by molten salt heat storage. (credit: TerraPower) On Tuesday, TerraPower, the US-based nuclear power company backed by Bill Gates, announced it has chosen a site for what would be its first reactor. Kemmerer, Wyoming, population roughly 2,500, has been the […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Chip Somodevilla) The Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for all adults as early as Thursday, agency insiders told The New York Times Tuesday. The reported timeline is remarkably fast-paced for the regulatory agency and comes as members of the Biden administration […]