Far from Earth, a tiny spacecraft is going to punch an asteroid tonight. Hayabusa2 is swooping close to Ryugu today to collect asteroid dust. The JAXA spacecraft has spent the last day leaving its usual orbit around the asteroid to zoom in close. In just few hours, it will be close enough to touch Ryugu. But it won’t stay long. The touchdown is more of a quick tag, and Hayabusa2 will stay just long enough to fire a tiny bullet into the asteroid’s surface, in order to stir up mater ...read more

Researchers have synthesized new ingredients for the blueprint of life. Steven Benner, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, and his team created four new DNA letters, according a study out today in the journal Science. The new eight-letter genetic system, dubbed “hachimoji” (hachi meaning eight in Japanese and moji meaning letter), doubles the number of building blocks for life. “A lot of people have hinted ...that the natural letters aren't the only sol ...read more

The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet launched is set to launch this evening on a trip to the moon, where it hopes to touch down in two months. This will be the first attempt at a lunar landing by a private company, and it's also the first launch by an Israeli spacecraft. Beresheet will take off from from Cape Canaveral on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets at 8:45 Eastern time tonight.  Small Craft, Big Expectations Beresheet’s creators are Israel Aerospace Industries and th ...read more

Scientists are still trying to figure out how the human body responds to long-duration spaceflight. It's an important and open research question as NASA moves toward more deep space missions. In particular, a mission to Mars could require at least a three-year round trip that would take a toll both physically and psychologically. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference last week, researchers revealed new insights into the phy ...read more

Astronomers have discovered a star in the Andromeda galaxy that has been regularly erupting for the past million years, leaving behind one of the biggest shells of ejected material scientists have ever seen. The new research, which was published last month in the journal Nature, not only marks the first discovery of such a super-remnant in another galaxy, it also paves the way for detecting a potentially massive population of repeatedly exploding stars, called recurrent novae, wh ...read more

Without those eight or so hours of precious shut-eye, many of us feel dazed, sluggish and downright useless. Sleep might be thought of as the great equalizer — birds do it, bees do it, every animal with a brain does it. But a new study suggests that might not be quite right after all. A study published today in the journal Science Advances found that some members of a species of fruit fly could, to the jealousy of humans, function on practically no sleep. After being kept awake for severa ...read more

Zebras are famous for their contrasting black and white stripes – but until very recently no one really knew why they sport their unusual striped pattern. It’s a question that’s been discussed as far back as 150 years ago by great Victorian biologists like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Since then many ideas have been put on the table but only in the last few years have there been serious attempts to test them. These ideas fall into four main categories: Zebras are ...read more

Testosterone often gets a bad rap as the cause of male aggression, but the hormone actually interacts with our bodies in far more, and more complex, ways. Now, in a new study in mice, researchers find that testosterone protects embryos from harm by reducing inflammation during development. It's a new role for the hormone, and one that could prove beneficial to humans, the researchers say. Female Fatality Genetics researcher John Schimenti and his research team at Cornell Universit ...read more

Neptune has a new moon, and it's also the gas giant's smallest to date — only a little over 20 miles across. The brand new satellite is called Hippocamp. Astronomers led by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute discovered it using the Hubble Space Telescope combined with an innovative method to track dim and tiny objects as they orbit. Because the object is so tiny, there’s still a lot astronomers don’t know about Hippocamp, named after a Greek sea monster in ke ...read more

Some 45,000 years ago, the tropical rainforests of Sri Lanka teemed with dangerous plants and lacked big game, yet people made a life there. Our key to success in that seemingly inhospitable region? It was monkeys and squirrels, researchers say — or rather, our ability to catch them. “These animals are difficult to catch and suggest a certain level of sophistication in terms of hunting strategies,” said Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the ...read more