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BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese government space agency successfully launched on Saturday its first rocket meant for commercial use, state television CCTV reported, as firms in the country compete to join a commercial satellite boom. Smart Dragon-1 rocket, which weighs 23 tonnes and was developed by a unit of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp

An illustration of an active black hole, one that accretes matter and accelerates a portion of it outwards in two perpendicular jets. The normal matter undergoing an acceleration like this describes how quasars work extremely well. The matter that falls into a black hole, of any variety, will be responsible for additional growth in both

Space tourism moved a step closer to reality Thursday as Virgin Galactic unveiled its new Mission Control at a spaceport in New Mexico and the schedule for final test flights before taking paying customers into the final frontier. Spaceport America, a taxpayer-funded facility in New Mexico’s remote Jornada del Muerto desert, received its license to

Specialists are eating the world. Tiger parents push their kids to get an early start and develop enough expertise to distinguish themselves for admissions committees from preschool through college. Academic departments push exquisite depth, seeking scholars to drill down and become world authorities in ever more narrow subjects. Corporate hiring managers seek candidates for roles

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine speaks to media during a visit to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility where engineers are preparing to add the final section to the core stage of the rocket that will power NASA’s Artemis 1 lunar mission, in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., August 15, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA Administrator Jim

ULA launching another WGS satellite in 2017, a mission some experts say the future Space Force could someday perform with low-cost small satellites from Low Earth Orbit. Photo By: Courtesy of United Launch Alliance The late summer heat is almost unbearable in Logan, Utah. Yet we still come in waves of thousands this year, to

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Genetic research that reconstructed the past population dynamics of the cave bear, a prominent prehistoric denizen of Europe, implicates Homo sapiens rather than climate cooling in the Ice Age extinction of these brawny plant-loving beasts. The skull of an extinct cave bear from the Natural History Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, is seen

People generally fall into three camps when it comes to the idea of a “digital detox”: those who can do it and feel refreshed afterward, those who try it and come back more stressed than ever, and those who would never even consider it. But a new study from researchers in both marketing and information systems

Asteroids – rocky bodies floating in the space – don’t evoke a particularly positive feeling. Remember one of them hitting the earth and wiping out the dinosaurs? Well, it appears that another huge asteroid might be on a collision course with our planet and might wreak havoc due to its sheer size. Named 1998 OR2,

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of NASA is set to announce plans on Friday to name the U.S. space agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama as headquarters for its human lunar lander program, signaling progress in its drive to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024, three people familiar with the plan said.

Virgin Galactic’s Gaia lounge at its new spaceport Virgin Galactic 2019 Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic unveiled the interiors of its new New Mexico spaceport Thursday, giving the public a glimpse of how the first $250,000-ticket tourists will spend their time before boarding suborbital space flights next year. “We’re on the home stretch now,” said Virgin

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, may have been smacked head-on by an embryonic planet 10 times Earth’s mass not long after being formed, a monumental crash with apparent lasting effects on the Jovian core, scientists said on Thursday. The collision between a young Jupiter and a massive still-forming protoplanet in the

Bottles of Poland Spring water on a shelf in New York. Credit: Tom Starkweather/Bloomberg News BLOOMBERG NEWS Instagram doesn’t have to be a waste of time. Beyond enriching your life with landscapes and other eye candy, it can help you figure out what can and can’t be recycled. Recycling contamination is a big deal because

TB is a major killer disease. Innovative research is now delivering shorter and safer drug treatments. Friends for International TB Relief, Vietnam (with permission) Last year, at the UN High Level Meeting on Tuberculosis, I spoke about the need to “science the shit out of TB.” Without innovation and ambition, we will continue to use

To prepare for the next mission to Mars in 2020, NASA has taken to the lava fields of Iceland to get its new robotic space explorer ready for the job. With its black basalt sand, wind-swept dunes and craggy peaks, the Lambahraun lava field at the foot of Iceland’s second biggest glacier, Langjokull, was chosen

This is what happens when a star turns itself inside out in less than a second. NASA/CXC/SAO It’s one thing to say that supernova explosions are bright. Is another thing completely to understand what that actually means. So let’s go on a little adventure. Supernovas are the deaths of the most massive stars in the

Dr. Sonia Batten, an oceanographer at the Marine Biological Association, first suspected pink salmon were causing problems in the North Pacific when she noticed a ‘see-saw’ effect between populations of pink salmon and the tiny shrimp-like animals they feed on; pink salmon are abundant in odd-numbered years, while their zooplankton shrimp-snacks are abundant in even-numbered years. Catch of pink salmon

Esther Amino and Salome Njeri are from Pwani Village in Kenya’s Rift Valley. There they attend Keriko Mixed Day Secondary School. It’s a small school where 95% of the students are from poor families, and many face issues like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, high drop out rates, and more. The school only has one computer,

TOKYO (Reuters) – Millions of years after the ancestors of humans evolved to lose their tails, a research team at Japan’s Keio University have built a robotic one they say could help unsteady elderly people keep their balance. Dubbed Arque, the grey one-meter device mimics tails such as those of cheetahs and other animals used

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has not stopped at lofty talks of colonising Mars. He has even estimated the cost of having a self-sustaining civilization on the Red Planet which is “between $100 billion and $10 trillion”. Musk tweeted his estimates of building a city on Mars in response to a question posed by the Twitter

Imagine having a metabolism 1 million times slower than another person. This is the reality for bacteria living in sediments at the bottom of deep oceans and rivers. Compared to lab-grown microbes thriving in an environment enriched with all the nutrients required for growth, these microbes only divide every 10 to 10,000 years. In contrast,

Libreshot In 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that the 21st century work week would last just 15 hours. Sadly, this prediction has not yet come to pass. If it’s any consolation, however, people are devoting more time to leisure activities. But who spends more time engaging in leisure pursuits, men or women?

An employee demonstrates a concept biometric payment system on the Wirecard AG exhibition stand at the Noah Technology Conference in Berlin, Germany in June. Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg Photo credit: © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP Earlier this year, San Francisco became the first city in the United States to ban the use

The Sturgeon Moon 2019, or the full moon for the month of August this year, is all set to rise later this week. It will peak when its Earth facing side is fully lit up by the Sun, and this will occur at 1:29pm BST when seen from London, and at 5:59pm IST in India.

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Churchill, CANADA: TO GO WITH AFP STORY US-SCIENCE-ANIMAL- (FILES) A polar bear waits on the edge of the Hudson Bay near the city of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada in this 10 October, 2002 file photo. Polar bears are resorting to cannibalism as global AFP/Getty Images The Trump

Weather information and dissemination have changed in recent decades. A survey conducted by Five Thirty Eight found that increasingly more people receive their weather information from an App on their smartphone. As a meteorologist, I often get questions about what App I typically use on my phone. It is often amusing when the person asking

Jeff Bezos speaking at the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres, a new glass dome conservatory at the company’s Seattle headquarters. If going to space is vital for a thriving civilization, then we had better develop the synthetic biology tools and tech to enable it. Seattle City Council The richest man on earth is trying

As Chandrayaan-2 cruises to reach the moon by August 20 and drop a lander called ‘Vikram’ on the Earth’s sole satellite on September 7, Google on Monday celebrated the 100th birthday of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai — father of the Indian space programme — with a Google Doodle. ISRO has also announced an award in his

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin She doesn’t know either. Must be a scientist. Free for commercial use (via Pixabay) Where does science happen? Where does it exist? If you’ve taken a science class in school, first, I’m very sorry, and second, you probably learned a bunch of facts. Those facts and

In today’s world of big data, marketing, and “big brother”, everyone wants a snippet of your data. Retail establishments want to know how you shop, streaming services want to know what you watch. But it doesn’t get much more personal than your genome – the blueprint of you. Could you ever trust a company with

TRONA, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 02 — View of meteorite streaking over Trona Pinnacles near Death Valley, CA during annual Perseid Meteor Showers, August 2, 2019. (Photo by Bob Riha Jr.,Getty Images) Getty Images It’s the time of year when your friends and family who are just a bit more nerdy or maybe outdoors-inclined all start

The Indian space agency on Tuesday successfully raised Chandrayaan-2’s orbit for fifth time at 3:04pm. According to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the orbit of Chandrayaan-2 was raised to an orbit of 276×142,975km by firing the spacecraft’s onboard motors for 1,041 seconds. All spacecraft parameters were normal. The next manoeuvre is Trans Lunar Insertion (TLI),

Steam from boiling water can cause scald injuries, even if you don’t feel pain. (Photo: Getty Images) Getty Your vagina is not a tea pot. It is not designed to handle hot steam. If you expose your vagina to hot steam, you could get burned, literally. That’s what happened to a woman in a case

As a climate scientist, I hear my share of myths about what is causing climate change or why it is a “hoax.” I call them “zombie theories” because they just will not die. They persist in blogs, certain networks, and social media like zombies long after scientists have killed them off. I debunked 20 of

An illustration of NASA’s TESS satellite and its capabilities of imaging transiting exoplanets. Kepler has given us more exoplanets than any other mission, and it revealed them all through the transit method. With TESS, we are looking to extend our capabilities even farther, using the same method with superior equipment and techniques. NASA There are

BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese startup LinkSpace on Saturday completed its third test of a reusable rocket in five months, stepping up the pace in China’s race to develop a technology key to cheap space launches in an expected global boom in satellite deployment. FILE PHOTO: Linkspace’s engineers pack the reusable rocket RLV-T5, also known as

A giant asteroid is hurling towards Earth; however, it will safely sail past our planet next week, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has said. The asteroid, which is known as 2006 QQ23, measures up to 1,870 feet in diameter, thus making it larger than New York’s Empire State Building that is 1,454 feet

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Any living organism that directly harnesses the sun’s energy uses one of three types of energy-converting pigments: chlorophyll, which gives plants their green color, bacteriochlorophyll, or retinal pigments, which help form microbial rhodopsins. Rhodopsins capture solar energy in the ocean’s surface and power microbial metabolism at

Meteorologists must choose from a multitude of weather models to create a forecast. These models vary in lead time, precision, and skill and each has their place when a meteorologist produces a forecast Getty Using the right tool for the job is a mantra that transcends workplaces and career paths. Much like a plumber choosing

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 has been studying giant planet Jupiter. NASA/ESA Just published is a new image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that reveals intricate details in the clouds of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Hubble’s new image of Jupiter. NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Spa Taken as

In good news for people who have blood pressure (BP) problems, monitoring BP might one day become as easy as taking a video selfie. Researchers have tested a technology called transdermal optical imaging that measures blood pressure by detecting blood flow changes in smartphone-captured facial videos. “This study shows that facial video can contain some

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. What an ugly fella. ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM Ah, meteor showers. A warm summer night. Blanket on the grass. A sky full of stars. Look, there’s one! Perhaps a quick streak of light through a corner of the sky – blink and you’ll miss it. Or maybe

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin E-cigarette liquid can contain a high percentage of nicotine, which in large doses could cause seizures, as well as dizziness, nausea, tremors, or even death. Getty Images Topline: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating 127 cases of e-cigarette users experiencing seizures, and hasn’t detected

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifts off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., August 8, 2019. Aboard is the fifth Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite, designed to provide the U.S. military with highly-secure communications. REUTERS/Joe Skipper (Reuters) – United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing

There might be life on the Moon after all: thousands of virtually indestructible creatures that can withstand extreme radiation, sizzling heat, the coldest temperatures of the universe, and decades without food. These terrifying-sounding beings aren’t aliens but instead microscopic Earthlings known as tardigrades, who likely made it out alive following a crash landing on the

Heliophysics is the study of how the Sun affects space and the space environment of planets. Credit: NASA/JPL NASA may soon use a constellation of free-flying CubeSats to track and image charged particles from the Sun as a means of better understanding our solar system’s space weather. The SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) project

Compostable products made from grass. Genera Rising up meet to consumer demand for more eco-friendly products, the biomass solutions company Genera Energy has procured an investment of more than $118 million to produce compostable food service items from locally grown grasses. The products will provide sustainable alternatives to plastics and polystyrene, including plates, bowls, takeout

Do we smell bad? Why are all these galaxies flying away from us? NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team For all intents and purposes, based on our most advanced cosmological observations, it appears as if we’re at the center of the universe. Our Milky Way galaxy is home to hundreds of