Dark matter has long frustrated researchers. It seems to make up most of our universe, yet it barely interacts with that universe. And despite a plethora of active experiments hunting for dark matter, so far they’ve all turned up empty.
That has some researchers turning to the next best thing: other dark particles. Our world of normal matter has lots of different particles, so perhaps there’s a whole dark world of particles as well. To be clear, no one’s found t ...read more
The amazing thing about national archives is that these libraries contain absolutely everything. Case in point: I recently found a letter in the Nixon Library from the Apollo Dry & Wet Cleaners in Pakistan. The owner was, apparently, a little miffed NASA took his business’ name for the lunar landing program and wanted press materials as restitution.
National archives, especially Presidential archives, are like a weird form of historical spelunking. Everything that anyone anywhere has ...read more
The human imprint on Earth is undeniable. Everywhere you look, you can find traces of our species’ short time on our roughly 4.5 billion-year-old planet. Often, those stamps are visible, like roads cutting through a forest or a patchwork of farmland covering what was once prairie. These marks can hinder the natural biodiversity of ecosystems, suffocating plant and animal species that once had a happy niche.
One way to undo some of this damage is to follow a conservation practice called re ...read more
Calling all tree lovers! This Arbor Day, help scientists study trees near you with TreeSnap, an easy-to-use app.
Are you a tree lover with a smartphone? If so, you can help out scientists who are trying to breed stronger trees. Like all living beings, trees face a variety of challenges and illnesses. In addition to threats like climate change, pollution, and loss of habitat, they also can be attacked by bugs or fall ill. Luckily, many scientists and community members are working together ...read more
Roughly 8 million years ago, some apes stood up and started human evolution.
Okay, that’s not really what happened. But it is a fair characterization of the way scientists identify the oldest fossils likely to be human ancestors. Upright walking apes mark the start of the study of human evolution in many texts and classes.
That’s because bipedalism, or two-legged locomotion, was the first major evolutionary change in human ancestors, which is evident from bones. Other distinguishin ...read more
It took astronomers a century to make the first-ever gravitational wave detection, confirming a core prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But this month, the floodgates have opened.
On Friday, scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced they’ve likely detected a second gravitational wave event in as many days. Detectors at three locations around the world caught the arrival of a probable ripple in space-time arou ...read more
On April 19, the Cygnus spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. Among plenty of other cargo, it carried special passengers: two small robots named Honey and Bumble. These “Astrobees” will soon become part of the station’s working crew, helping with such tasks as checking inventory, recording astronauts and experiments and running their own research projects.
Bees in Space
Terry Fong, Chief Roboticist at NASA Ames, expects that the robots might start work as e ...read more
For just the second time, physicists working on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have caught the gravitational waves of two neutron stars colliding to form a black hole.
The ripples in space time traveled some 500 million light-years and reached the detectors at LIGO, as well as its Italian sister observatory, Virgo, at around 4 a.m. E.T. on Thursday, April 25. Team members say there’s a more than 99 percent chance that the gravitational waves were created f ...read more
Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft dropped an explosive onto its asteroid home, Ryugu, back on April 5, blasting a new crater into its rocky surface so it could investigate what lies beneath. Since then, the spacecraft has been in hiding around the asteroid’s far side, waiting for the dust to settle. Yesterday, it ventured out to survey the damage.
The pictures Hayabusa2 returned reveal a crater roughly 66 feet across, larger than even scientists’ most generous expectations. Th ...read more
