When you go outside you may expect rain to occasionally fall from the sky, maybe even excrement from our flying friends — but a rogue space station? As we learned from Sir Isaac Newton, “What goes up must come down,” and China’s Tiangong-1 space station is coming down fast.
The space station will plummet to Earth any time between now and April 2018, the Guardian reported last week. News broke in September 2016 that the 8.5-ton space station, called Tiangong-1, meani ...read more
Self-driving vehicles could soon be cruisin’ down California streets with no humans. (Credit: Waymo)
You’ve read about self-driving cars cruising around California as companies try to prove and perfect their tech. A human sits in each car, but not because they want to joyride: it’s the law.
But that could change.
Last week, California lawmakers proposed legislation that would make it legal for companies to test self-driving cars without a human watchdog in the vehicl ...read more
Two neutron stars merge into a kilonova. (Credit: Illustration by Robin Dienel, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science)
For hundreds of millions of years, two city-sized stars in a galaxy not-so-far away circled each other in a fatal dance. Their dimensions were diminutive, but each outweighed our sun.
They were neutron stars — the collapsed cores left behind after giant stars explode into supernovas. Closer and closer they spun, shedding gravitational energy, until the stars t ...read more
The Journal of Neuroscience recently featured a debate over the hypothesis that Parkinson’s disease is, at least in some cases, caused by prions – misfolded proteins that spread from neuron to neuron.
A prion is a protein that has taken on an abnormal shape and that can spread itself by making other, healthy molecules of the same protein adopt its abnormal configuration. The best-known prion disease is variant CJD aka “mad cow disease”, but some researchers believe that ...read more
The LIGO detector in Livingston, Louisiana. (Credit: LIGO Collaboration)
The massive collaboration of scientists that’s hunting gravitational waves—with a lot of success—is set to make another big announcement on Monday.
A flurry of press releases this week have teased the news, which is set to break on Oct. 16, although they’ve been short on details. At 10 a.m. Eastern, a team from the groundbreaking gravitational wave detector LIGO will make an announcement at th ...read more
Drones are helping scientists understand Earth’s lava flows, which could tell us more about ancient Mars. (Credit: Shuttershock)
Lava flow: an unstoppable destructive force that burns pretty much everything in its path. When a volcano erupts, it’s important that people in surrounding areas have adequate time to evacuate. To provide those crucial extra hours, or minutes, researchers are using drones to improve hazard predictions, and perhaps tell us something about life on ancient Ma ...read more
Oh, artificial intelligence, how quickly you grow up. Just three months ago you were learning to walk, and we watched you take your first, flailing steps.
Today, you’re out there kicking a soccer ball around and wrestling. Where does the time go?
Indeed, for the past few months we’ve stood by like proud parents and watched AI reach heartwarming little milestones. In July, you’ll recall, Google’s artificial intelligence company in the United Kingdom, DeepMind, developed a ...read more
