Thanks to a mashup of science and industry, researchers have developed a prototype spacecraft that can mine water from an asteroid, use that water to generate steam, then use that steam as fuel to hop across the surface of an asteroid — or even jump to an entirely different world altogether. The prototype spacecraft — named The World Is Not Enough (WINE) — was largely developed by Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California, with plenty of help from planetary ...read more

All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons – on coffee makers, TV remote controls and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to understand why, looking into where buttons came from, why people love them – and why people loathe them. As I researched my recent book, “Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing,” about the origins of American push-button society ...read more

The ocean is rich in diverse shades of blue and green. Now researchers find climate change will alter the color of the oceans by the end of the 21st century. The changes won't be dramatic, in fact, they likely won't be visible to the naked eye, but it suggests that the hue of the ocean could be an important marker for scientists watching to see how climate change will affect our seas. “Ocean color will give us an earlier signal of climate change effects on the marine ecosystem t ...read more

The shape of the Milky Way, usually pictured as a flat spiral, may actually be more like a warped and twisted disk. That's according to a new study of 1,339 stars whose distances could be measured with great accuracy. The resulting map reveals a tipped, uneven disk of material different from our standard picture. Mapping Pulsating Stars The 1,339 stars are all Cepheid variables, a type of pulsating star whose intrinsic brightness depends on how long it takes to vary from bright to ...read more

Gazing up at the sky, it's hard not to imagine the sun, moon, stars, and planets as part of an inverted bowl over our heads, even if we know that's an antiquated way of viewing the heavens. These days, we understand it’s the Earth that’s spinning, spinning daily like a ballerina while also circling the sun on its yearly journey. But the bowl imagery was and remains a reasonable way of envisioning how the skies appear to revolve around us, and when certain stars appear or disappear wi ...read more

NASA is often viewed as the epitome of big ideas and extreme planning. But sometimes even they go above and beyond, either with incredible improvised fixes, or missions that survived the test of time and then some. Hubble Got Glasses The greatest space telescope astronomers have was almost a giant flop. When the telescope launched in 1991, the pictures it sent back were muddled and far below the predicted quality. It turned out a mirror had been ground to the wrong specifications, leav ...read more

A new paper offers a broad challenge to a certain kind of 'grand theory' about the brain. According to the authors, Federico E. Turkheimer and colleagues, it is problematic to build models of brain function that rely on 'strong emergence'. Two popular theories, the Free Energy Principle aka Bayesian Brain and the Integrated Information Theory model, are singled out as examples of strong emergence-based work. Emergence refers to the idea that a system can exhibit behavior or propert ...read more

Massive volumes of water circulate throughout the Atlantic Ocean and serve as the central drivers of Earth’s climate. Now researchers have discovered that the heart of this circulation is not where they suspected. “The general understanding has been [that it’s] in the Labrador Sea, which sits between the Canadian coast and the west side of Greenland,” said Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the new research. &ldqu ...read more

The Chinese Chang'e-4 lunar mission is returning data again after a scheduled two-week rest period. It's rover, Yutu-2, woke up on January 29, but the Chang'e-4 lander slept in an extra day. The rest mode was necessary due to the frigid nighttime temperatures on the lunar far side, which plunged as low as -310 degrees Fahrenheit. The Chang'e-4 mission is the first to explore the far side of the moon, and the cold temperatures are part of the discovery process. Chang'e-4 Disagrees with Ap ...read more

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a small and strangely isolated dwarf galaxy just 30 million light-years away from our own Milky Way. And astronomers say the discovery was completely by accident. Luigi Bedin, of the Astronomical Observatory of Padua, and his colleagues were using Hubble to study a globular star cluster called NGC 6752. Globular clusters are tightly packed crowds of ancient stars. And when they looked at the images Hubble sent back, they noticed a small galaxy hid ...read more