A Successful Landing
Last night (Dec. 19), a NASA astronaut, a German flight engineer and a Russian cosmonaut landed safely back on Earth after six months of hard work in space.
Yesterday, the three astronauts buckled into the cramped descent module of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, undocked from the International Space Station, and began the three-and-a-half hour journey home to Earth. As the craft neared the planet's surface, it deployed a massive orange-and-white p ...read more
Kevin Lafferty gets more than his share of intimate disclosures from strangers about their anatomy and bodily functions.
Graphic details and pictures arrive steadily via email, from people all over the world — a prison inmate in Florida, a social psychologist in Romania, a Californian afraid he picked up a nasty worm in Vietnam — begging for help, often after explaining that doctors will no longer listen. Do I have bugs burrowing into my brain? Insects poking around under my skin? C ...read more
It's that time of year to vote for the 2018 Pliny for Volcanic Event of the Year. We've had a lot of volcanic action worldwide this year and you can see some of the highlights in this compilation from the Atlantic or by checking out this year's Weekly Volcanic Activity Reports from the Global Volcanism Program.
So, as usual, I look to you all to cast a ballot the Pliny. Send me (rockyplanetblog at gmail), tweet me (@eruptionsblog #2018Pliny) or leave a comment with your top 3 volcanic eve ...read more
How do animals live in the cold, oxygen-starved environments of the high mountains? Himalayan marmots — beaver-ish rodents of unusual size — may have an answer, find scientists who have assembled a complete draft genome of the animal. The analysis may provide insight to how we adapt to the cold.
"As one of the highest-altitude-dwelling mammals, the Himalayan marmot is chronically exposed to cold temperature, hypoxia [lack of oxygen], and intense UV radiation," Enqi Liu of Xi'an Jiao ...read more
These tiny particles are being lifted with sound — no magic tricks required! Scientists have harnessed the physical force of sound waves before, but for the first time acoustic levitation has been successfully used on multiple objects independently.
The breakthrough was achieved by Asier Marzo Pérez of the University of Navarra in Spain and Bruce Drinkwater of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Their results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National A ...read more
A Big Bang Fossil
Astronomers have discovered an ancient remnant of the Big Bang with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. This scrap of pure material from the universe's beginning could help researchers to better understand how and why different types of stars and galaxies formed in the early universe.
A group of astronomers, led by Fred Robert and Michael Murphy of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia used telescopes at the W. M. Keck Obe ...read more
Scores of Aboriginal Australians were taken from their homelands when Europeans colonized Australia. And today, native peoples and their ancestors’ remains are scattered throughout the country and at museums around the world. Now, new research shows DNA analysis can identify where to repatriate the ancestral remains.
“Our findings show that DNA can be used to help determine the origin of ancient Aboriginal Australian remains that have [otherwise] been impossible to provenance,& ...read more
Any bodybuilder will tell you that you can’t bulk up overnight, but that might not be true for stars. While observing infant star Gaia 17bpi, astronomers saw part of its dense disk collapse onto its body below — adding mass at an incredible rate. This encounter is one of the few times that researchers have seen a star's disk become gravitationally unstable and fall down to its host. The findings, which will appear in the Astrophysical Journal, could shed light on stell ...read more
Tonight at 8:40 p.m. EST, Expedition 57 Commander Alexander Gerst and Flight Engineers Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Sergey Prokopyev will end their 197-day mission in space and return home inside the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft.
The astronauts will undock the spacecraft from the International Space Station, travel back toward Earth, and ultimately parachute down to Kazakhstan three-and-a-half hours later. Prokopyev will command the Soyuz flight which will be live-streamed ...read more
