Moon-bound Tomorrow, at about 1:30 p.m. EST (2:30 a.m. on Dec. 8 local time), China’s robotic Chang'e-4 mission will launch on a Long March 3B rocket, headed for the lunar surface. After launching, the spacecraft will spend 27 days traveling to the moon. Upon arrival at our rocky satellite, an accompanying lander, which doubles as a rover, will descend towards the surface. The craft will touch down in the Von Kármán Crater in the South Pole‐Ait ...read more

Human tissues on a chip are headed into space. Tissue chips contain a small network of cells that work like real human organs, and are a safe, compact way for scientists to study the human body. SpaceX's Dragon resupply mission launched from Florida yesterday and is currently rocketing toward the International Space Station (ISS). On board are a few dozen chips designed to mimic the immune system — like the kidney-on-a-chip shown here. The missions is led by the National Institu ...read more

If orbiting just 4 million miles from your fiery host star wasn’t bad enough, things might have just gotten even worse. New research shows that stars emitting high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation could strip the atmospheres of their ultra-close exoplanets. While observing gas giants that orbit exceptionally close to their host stars, astronomers found that those bombarded with radiation were losing helium from their atmospheres. These results, which were published in multiple st ...read more

A new study shows the historical dates of key archaeological sites associated with Europeans’ first contact with indigenous communities are off by nearly 100 years. The discovery “dramatically rewrites” the history of northeastern North America, researchers report today in the journal Science Advances. “It will really change how we understand the history ... of this entire period, just before and during early contact with European civilization,” Sturt Manning, a pa ...read more

For the first time, researchers have identified blubber, and other soft tissue, preserved in an Early Jurassic ichthyosaur. The new interpretation of the 180-million-year-old fossil suggests that the extinct marine reptiles were warm-blooded. Ichthyosaurs swam the Mesozoic Era seas and were roughly contemporary with dinosaurs. They are often compared with modern toothed whales, particularly porpoises (though at least one ichthyosaur species attained blue whale-like size). Many paleont ...read more

Scientists have announced a breakthrough in stem cell research that could have major implications for medical treatments that involve regenerating human cells. And their discovery came from an unlikely source: royal jelly. It's the same substance honey bees use to turn a common bee larvae into a queen. Royal Jelly A queen bee starts her life just like any other bee – a larva in the honey bee hive, taken care of by her siblings. But when it’s time for a new queen, this larva is pulled ...read more

Nearly 25 percent of the world is anemic. Now researchers have created a smartphone app that can detect the condition with a photo. The new tech could mean diagnosing and monitoring the blood disorder without a finger poke or blood draw. “This is a way for anyone to screen themselves for anemia and all they have to do is download an app,” said Wilbur Lam, a bioengineer and pediatric hematologist at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta, who led the new research. “It doe ...read more

It’s easy to stereotype mice: They really can all look alike. In fact, even armed with genetic knowledge about their DNA, it can be hard for biologists to tell apart different species. They’re just so similar. Well, not every bit of them is. A group at biologists recently found a new way to tell apart their murine specimens — by looking at mouse sperm. Their findings appear in the Journal of Mammalogy, and could mean not just improved games of Guess Who in the lab, but also sh ...read more

Black Hole Fountains Where once were donuts, now there may be fountains. Not literally, unfortunately, but new astronomical observations are rewriting scientists' conceptions of what the area around a black hole looks like, and the new evidence seems to lean heavily away from the morning delicacy. Scientists estimate that most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, pulling in everything around them with tremendous gravitational forces. Up until now, astronomers believed&n ...read more

I mentioned to a friend, a gay man nearing 60, that World AIDS Day, which has been observed on Dec. 1 since 1988, was almost upon us. He had no idea that World AIDS Day still exists. This lack of knowledge is a testament to the great accomplishments that have occurred since World AIDS Day was created 30 years ago. It is also due to an accident in the timing of his birth that my friend escaped the devastation wreaked by AIDS among gay men in the U.S., before there was antiretroviral therap ...read more