A SpaceX Dragon cargo craft on a resupply mission to the ISS. (Credit: NASA)
Just days after the three newest crew members arrived on the
International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule is set to launch
on a resupply mission.
At about 6:24 p.m. EDT on July 24, a Falcon 9 rocket with
the attached Dragon capsule are scheduled to blast off from the Space Launch
Complex at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. Dragon is supposed to reach the ISS
for docking on Friday.
On ...read more
The tiny spheres, evidence of a long-ago asteroid strike, are smaller than grains of salt. (Credit: Mike Meyer/Meteoritics and Planetary Science)
In 2006, an undergraduate student from the University of
South Florida named Mike Meyer spent his summer collecting fossils from the
walls of a quarry. In typical intern glory, his job was to pry open fossilized
clams and wash away sediment, looking for shells of long-dead single-celled
organisms.
Instead, he found what appeared to be miniscule ...read more
(Credit: fizkes/Shutterstock)
Hey, what do you call a sleeping dinosaur? A dino-SNORE!
What’s wrong, don’t find that funny? Well, what if I told you the exact same joke, but instead of crickets, uproarious laughter accompanied the punchline? According to a study today in Current Biology, you’d find it noticeably funnier.
The researchers found that even if the laughter is fake — posed, and not actual spontaneous laughter — it’d still boost your opini ...read more
With help from dark matter annihilation, some of the universe’s earliest stars were able to grow much larger than they would otherwise. (Credit: Astronomy/Roen Kelly after NSF)
Powered by dark matter, dark stars are hypothetical objects that may have inhabited the early universe. If they existed, these mysterious beasts would not only have been the first stars to form in the cosmos, they also might explain how supermassive black holes got their start.
Fueled by Dark Matter
(Cr ...read more
By pinpointing the ages and origins of stars in the Milky Way, astronomers can trace its history. (Credit: Koppelman, Villalobos and Helmi/NASA/ESA/Hubble)
Ten billion years ago, the Milky Way encountered another galaxy in the vast emptiness of space, and consumed it. Dubbed Gaia-Enceladus by astronomers, this stranger was roughly a quarter the Milky Way’s size, and it forever changed the makeup and shape of our home galaxy.
Scientists have had evidence for a while that the Milky Wa ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine