Last June, space exploration enthusiasts from across the world collectively held their breath as a global dust storm enveloped Mars. They did so not because our view of the Red Planet's surface was obscured, but instead because a go-kart-sized rover named Opportunity, which had been roaming the Red Planet for nearly 15 years, fell silent as the storm intensified. After eight months of fruitless attempts to resurrect "Oppy," which was only slated for a mission lasting 90 days, on February 13, ...read more
Three new crewmembers will join the International Space Station this week, launching today in a Soyuz vessel from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:14 p.m. EDT. The two NASA astronauts, Nick Hague and Christina Koch, will fly with Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin on a Soyuz spacecraft and dock with ISS after a six-hour flight. They will join NASA’s Anne McClain, Roscosmos’ Oleg Kononenko, and the Canadian Space Agency’s David Saint-Jacques, who have been in space since De ...read more
More than a dozen top scientists from seven countries are calling for world governments to adopt a moratorium on what scientists call heritable genome editing. They’re on a mission to make sure the world doesn’t see any more gene-edited babies -- not till we’re good and ready -- and they’ve got a plan to stop it.
The group penned a commentary published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The effort was led by Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute and a professor at b ...read more
As I'm writing this at 11:30 a.m. on March 13, 2019, winds are gusting above 45 miles per hour, snow is blowing horizontally outside my patio window, and the lights in my home are flickering. I hope manage to get this story posted before the electricity goes out...
Winter Storm Ulmer is intensifying over the High Plains and going through a process known as "bombogenesis." You can see its evolution today in the animation above, consisting of infrared imagery from the GOES-16 weather sa ...read more
Some things, it appears, never change. Death and taxes are certainties, the poor we will always have with us, and of course war… war never changes. But, according to a study today in the open-access journal Science Advances, similarly untouchable is the status of Stonehenge and its ilk as tourist destinations — and our love for partying it up with pork.
The study, by a team of British archaeologists and geologists, analyzed the chemical components of pig remains at sites near the f ...read more
When your doctor prescribes a medication, they take care not to give you something that might cause harm. But, many drugs have a hidden danger for people with allergies or other sensitivities. The inactive ingredients, non-drug components of a medication, can contain compounds that cause harm. And, says a new study, many doctors don't even know what those ingredients are.
It's not really a doctor's job to know the exact formulation of every medication they give out, of course, especially ...read more
The universe is getting messy. Like a glass shattering to pieces or a single wave crashing onto the shore, the universe’s messiness can only move in one direction – toward more chaos and disorder. But scientists think that, at least for a single electron or the simplest quantum computer, they may be able to turn back time, and restore order to chaos. This doesn't mean we'll be visiting with dinosaurs or Napoleon any time soon, but for physicists, the idea that time can run backward a ...read more
