(Credit: Courtesy Xinhua News Agency)
On Wednesday, China became the third country to conduct a sea-based space launch when it sent a Long March 11 rocket into orbit carrying experimental tech and five commercial satellites.
The rocket, also named “CZ-11 WEY,” blasted off from a platform in the Yellow Sea built from a modified drilling rig off the coast of the Shandong province. The launch platform itself was announced in a government press release earlier this week. In that ...read more
(Credit: Zoran Matic/shutterstock)
Math is famously divisive. Some people like to say they’re not “math people” if they have trouble with the subject (though, that might not actually be a healthy approach). Well, guess who have turned out to be math people? Honeybees!
Devoted readers may recall some past stories on this front. Almost exactly a year ago, we learned that bees can understand basic numbers, including the semi-abstract concept of zero. Then, in February, scien ...read more
Spattering lava during the recent eruption at Etna in Italy, seen on May 30, 2019. Image by Giuseppe Distefano, used by permission.
Over on Sicily off Italy's western coast, Etna decided to bring the heat for the start of summer. After a fairly quiet few months, the volcano roared back over the weekend with explosions, new fissures opening and long lava flows. Etna watchers will be keeping on eye on the volcano to see if this is the start of a set of major eruptions like we saw in 2013.
T ...read more
Curiosity snapped this selfie May 12, 2019; to the left of the rover are its two recent two drill sites, "Aberlady" and "Kilmarie." (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Finding the conditions to support life on Mars is the main goal for NASA's Curiosity rover, and a new discovery of clay could be leading the rover on the right path.
After drilling in an area on Mars dubbed the “clay-bearing unit,” Curiosity turned up two new samples that have the highest amounts of clay minera ...read more
A sample return mission would require multiple launches and grabbing samples out of Mars’ orbit. (Credit: ESA/ATG Medialab)
NASA isn’t the only space agency with a hunger for the Red Planet. The European Space Agency would also like to snatch samples from Mars, and now they're making their own plans for a mission that will bring back priceless pieces of our neighboring planet.
ESA’s plans will certainly work in cooperation with NASA’s, and in fact NASA’s upco ...read more
If you delve into the wildest depths of the scientific literature, you will find a trilogy of papers so weird, that they have become legendary.
In these articles, spanning a 12 year period, author Jarl Flensmark says that heeled shoes cause mental illness, while flat footwear promotes brain health:
Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia? (2004)Physical activity, eccentric contractions of plantar flexors, and neurogenesis: therapeutic potential of fla ...read more
(Credit: Andrew Burgess/Shutterstock)
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has no cure. And medications to treat the condition’s core symptoms – anxiety, repetitive behaviors and difficulty engaging in social interactions like talking to others – do not exist. Now researchers may have landed on a simple and effective way to ease autism symptoms: exercise.
Exercise reversed autistic behaviors in an animal model of the condition researchers announced Tuesday in the journal&n ...read more
Before the brewpub there was the brew cave.
In Israel's Raqefet Cave archaeologists recently reported traces of what could be the earliest known beer production 13,000 years ago.
The evidence comes from three stone mortars, analyzed in a 2018 Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports paper. After extracting residues from the rocks, the researchers identified plant molecules, including wheat or barley starches that appeared malted, mashed and fermented — the main ingredients and basic ...read more
Officials recently expanded the Port of Miami to allow in larger ships, impacting local coral colonies in the process. (Credit: Felix Mizioznikov/Shutterstock)
Coral reefs along the Florida coastline are struggling. Disease has been running rampant among colonies in recent years, and now researchers have found that a billion-dollar dredging project that wrapped up in 2015 killed off more than half of the coral population in the Port of Miami.
A study published May 24 in the journal Marin ...read more
The young star system includes two gas giants, shown here in an artist's illustration still forming and carving out gaps in the disk of material around their central star. (Credit: J. Olmsted/STScI)
While discoveries of exoplanets are commonplace these days, the most obvious detection method – directly taking a picture of a planet – remains one of the most challenging. And such images almost always reveal a single, giant planet orbiting far from its host star.
So researchers w ...read more
