Laika before her flight. via Wikipedia.
“Dog in Second Satellite Alive; May be Recovered, Soviet Hints; While House is Calm Over Feat” The headline blared across the front page of the New York Times on November 4, 1957. The story continued on page 8 with followup articles on pages 9 and 10. The space age was only a month old and the satellite both excited and terrified Americans who feared bombs would start dropping from space.
But one US Air Force flight surgeon was fasci ...read more
The Mars 2020 rover. (Credit: NASA)
NASA must be big fans of Douglas Quaid in Total Recall. “Get your ass to Mars,” he says, and NASA listened, sending 24 probes, landers and rovers over the past five decades. It’s just too tempting a target: The closest, easiest planetary neighbor for us to explore, which may or may not prove habitable, also tells scientists more about the solar system’s history.
We’re steadily learning more and more about the next Mars rover, cu ...read more
CERN, which houses the Large Hadron Collider. (Credit: Dominionart/Shutterstock)
When hydrogen atoms fuse together, they release a vast amount of energy. That’s the principle that makes hydrogen bombs so frighteningly powerful, and it’s part of what powers our sun as well. Now, researchers from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they’ve uncovered a kind of theoretical particle fusion that’s almost eight times more energetic than the fusion of two hydrogen atoms.
T ...read more
An artist’s impression of the dust belts around Proxima Centauri. (Credit: ESO)
Our nearest neighboring star just got a whole lot richer as a system—and a whole lot weirder.
In research published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers from the European Southern Observatory announced … quite a few things, really. The biggest and brightest—literally—of their discoveries is a ring of icy dust around our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, that’s s ...read more
(Credit: chaiyawat chaidet/Shutterstock)
Transfusing blood from young mice into those with Alzheimer’s doesn’t appear to treat the disease.
It’s an out-there concept that seems more of a kind with cryogenetics and organ xenotransplants but the promise of rejuvenation by blood infusion actually has some scientific legs to stand on.
Shoulder to Lean On
That the blood of the youthful might help the elderly was first proposed over 150 years ago when studies of mice whose cir ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
When paleontologists pull woolly mammoth fossils from mud pits, sinkholes, mudflows and other ancient booby traps, odds are it was a male that fell victim to the hazard.
This macabre gender bias, researchers say in a new study, serves as a window into the behavioral patterns of these hirsute beasts that died out roughly 10,000 years ago. It turns out, as one might expect, woolly mammoth society may not have been so different from the pachyderm families that roam earth to ...read more
The First Americans may have followed a “kelp highway” of marine resources via a coastal route from Siberia to the New World. Nutrient-rich kelp beds such as these, near Crook Point on the Oregon coast, attract salmon and other sea life that would have sustained the early explorers. (Credit Roy W. Lowe/U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
The average person’s idea of how — and when — the first people arrived in the Americas needs a serious revision, say researche ...read more
We found you Tapanuli orangutan! (Credit: Maxime Aliaga)
A newly discovered species of orangutan is already teetering on the edge of extinction. The Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) have been identified as the most endangered great ape species in the world, consisting of less than 800 individuals.
That population size is strikingly different from the two other known species of orangutans. There are an estimated 14,000 Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) and 100,000 Bornean ora ...read more
(Credit: Don Mammoser/Shutterstock)
A large chamber, never-before observed, has been discovered in the Great Pyramid at Giza.
The previously unknown space was announced Thursday by an international team of researchers who used cosmic ray detectors to discern the presence of what they call a “big void” inside the pyramid’s structure as part of the Scan Pyramids project. The void lies just above the Grand Gallery passageway that leads to the King’s chamber within the mass ...read more
