On Friday, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo will fly in space for the second time, taking off from Mojave, California after days of weather delay. Their launch time is set for 8 a.m. PST. Unlike most spaceflights that fire rockets from the ground, SpaceShipTwo is carried on the back of a plane named WhiteKnightTwo before being released to propel itself into the upper atmosphere. It’s a suborbital flight, meaning it does not reach orbit, and attains weightlessness for only a few m ...read more

A team of scientists at the University of Alberta used an image spectrometer — essentially a specialized camera that captures light waves invisible to the naked eye — to create this technicolor shot of plants in the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in Minnesota. The different colors show differences in plants’ functions, which, the team suggests in a paper published last year in Nature Ecology & Evolution, could be a way to illustrate and track biodiversity. ...read more

The adage that “the older you are, the wiser you get” doesn’t always apply to our immune systems. Despite being exposed to a lifetime’s worth of illnesses, immune systems in the elderly are worse at fighting stealthy, shape-shifting viruses like the flu. Why aging decreases our immune system’s abilities has been a mystery to researchers. But a new study published in Cell Host & Microbe finds that our infection-battling B-cells become blunted ...read more

Scientists have discovered a new species of tiny tyrannosaur that lived some 95 million years ago in what’s now Utah. The find helps fill a frustrating gap in the fossil record at a critical time when tyrannosaurs were evolving from small, speedy hunters, into the bone-crushing apex predators we know so well. The new dinosaur has been dubbed Moros intrepidus, and its name means “harbinger of doom.” The creature, known only from a leg bone and some various teeth, weighed u ...read more

Nearly 66 million years ago, most living things on Earth died. Most researchers agree that the prime culprit was an asteroid that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, leading to the mass extinction that took out most of the dinosaurs. But in a new research published Thursday, two independent research groups are making the case that enormous volcanic eruptions in India likely contributed to the demise of life, too. The findings shed light on not only one of the most famou ...read more

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