On Thursday, Blue Origin founder and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos unveiled the Blue Moon lander, a spacecraft that can deliver up to 6.5 tons of cargo – and possibly crew – to the lunar surface. The announcement was made at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Along with Blue Moon, he revealed his new BE-7 rocket for the lander, which he says has been in development for three years. If all goes according to plan, the company will test fire the rocket for the first time this summer. Toget ...read more
The first human-made spacecraft to reach another star system might fit in the palm of your hand. That’s the design engineers from the University of California, Santa Barbara are working on. The tiny craft, which weighs about as much same as a stick of gum, had its first test flight in April, where it soared more than 100,000 feet in the air. Its creators hope its successor will one day fly in space, perhaps even beyond the solar system to neighboring stars like Alpha Centauri.
Wafercr ...read more
Around the world, obesity is on the rise. A global uptick in body mass index, or BMI — a measure of whether a person’s weight is healthy for how tall they are — has coincided with rapid urbanization, leading to the assumption that urbanization is the main reason behind the global obesity epidemic.
Now, a large new report reveals the rise of global BMI comes from people living in rural areas rather than people living in urban areas. The finding contrasts the ...read more
Powered flight among living things has been around for hundreds of millions of years. Dinosaurs, and their relatives the pterosaurs, figured out how to take to the skies long before their avian descendants today did. Now, a new species of dinosaur is shedding some light on the evolutionary path that lofted reptiles skyward.
The fossil, discovered in Liaoning Province in China and named Ambopteryx longibrachium, is actually notable for the fact that it seems to be an altogether different e ...read more
Remember Australopithecus sediba? The convention-challenging South African hominin, announced with much fanfare in 2010, has gotten lost in a torrent of other recent fossil finds from our family tree. A new study adds insult to injury, stacking the odds against A. sediba's place in our distant evolutionary past.
The last decade or so has been a wild ride for researchers trying to figure out the story of human evolution. The family tree of hominins — humans and species more clos ...read more
As a lung transplant surgeon, Matt Bacchetta has watched countless patients wait for an organ, only to not get one. About 80 percent of donor lungs are not in good enough to shape to use. Now Bacchetta and a team of researchers from Columbia University in New York City have shown that they can repair damaged pig lungs so they are suitable for transplants. If it works in humans, the discovery could dramatically expand the number of usable donor organs, the researchers say.
“There’s s ...read more
These are consequential days for ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft. Drivers in many U.S. cities are going on strike today, protesting low pay, and analysts expect Uber will likely earn billions when it goes public on Friday. (The two events are not unrelated.)
But amidst the economic discussions, at least we can all agree that it’s good news in terms of traffic, right? The more people rely on professional drivers to get around, the fewer individual cars will be clogging up the str ...read more
