Astronaut Chris Ferguson looks like a man on a mission in the new suit. (Credit: Boeing)
NASA’s astronauts will be looking a little blue in the near future—because of their striking new attire.
Boeing has introduced a line of sleeker, smarter and perhaps most-noticeably, bluer spacewear.
The suits, nick-named the “Boeing Blues,” were designed specifically for those currently being trained for flight in Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX Dragon capsules &ndash ...read more
Features on Mars like this one, a likely river delta deposit, point to a warmer ancient past. (Image: NASA/JPL)
Climate change on Earth is a well-established phenomenon, but scientists have long struggled to explain an even more dramatic change of conditions, long ago in a far-off land.
Mars is a dry, frigid planet today, with an average ground temperature of about -60 °C. Liquid water seems to be possible only under a narrow range of circumstances, but for the most part, water sublimates ...read more
From left to right: A rat-mouse chimera, regular rat and regular mouse. The rat-mouse chimera was generated by injecting mouse iPS cells into a rat embryo. (Credit: Tomoyuki Yamaguchi)
An interspecies transplant turned out to be an effective cure in diabetic mice, bringing the prospect of growing made-to-order human organs in other species a bit closer to reality.
It’s the first time that small parts of an organ, in this case pancreatic cells called islets, grown inside one&nbs ...read more
Last week, we learned that Scholarly Open Access, Jeffrey Beall’s website and blog, had gone down. Beall, an academic librarian at the University of Denver, has earned fame, and notoriety, for his list of what he calls ‘predatory’ open access publishers and journals.
It’s still not clear what led to the demise of Beall’s blog. There were rumors of possible legal threats. The University of Denver eventually released a statement saying that Beall “has decided t ...read more
A night launch for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. (Image: Flickr/SpaceX)
Launching rockets into space has traditionally been the domain of nation states: only a handful of countries over the last several decades have mounted the technical expertise and financial resources to put payloads in orbit. With so few players, outer space was governed by the “Cold War principles” outlined in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which holds nation states accountable and reserves the use of space ...read more
Geico’s “so easy a caveman can do it” advertising campaign incorrectly minimized the intelligence of Neanderthals. (Credit: Shutterstock)
(This post originally appeared in the online anthropology magazine SAPIENS. Follow @SAPIENS_org on Twitter to discover more of their work.)
For the last dozen years or so, Geico Insurance has run commercials featuring Neanderthals in modern contexts. The story line varies, but the take-home point does not: Switching to ...read more
The TeamIndus rover. (Credit: TeamIndus)
A team of undergraduate engineers from the University of California-San Diego hopes to be the first to brew beer in space.
They are one of 25 teams competing for a spot aboard India’s TeamIndus lunar lander mission, which itself is vying for a $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE. Inspired by home brewing projects, the young engineers want to study how yeast behaves in outer space.
Beer Blast-off
Their experiment consists of a soda-can sized ...read more
Pilots from Weather Modification, Inc., prepare the cloud seeding aircraft with seeding flares. (Credit: Derek Blestrud, Idaho Power Company)
“Make mud, not war.” That was the slogan of the American 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squad, the first military force to engage in weather warfare.
Throughout the Vietnam War, they flew 2,602 missions, releasing silver iodide, a compound that seeded clouds and exacerbated monsoons—or so the thinking went. Dubbed “Operation Popeye&r ...read more
After a late dinner, a jungle-dwelling whip spider can’t rely on an Uber driver to get her home. She has to find the way herself, in the pitch-black, picking her way over thick undergrowth to reach the tree she lives on. It’s a trick she can even manage when plucked from her home tree and tossed into the forest at random, up to 10 meters away. Now scientists think whip spiders don’t use her eyes for this homing feat—they use their feet.
Whip spiders hunt b ...read more
