Vandenberg’s Next Mission: SpaceX Rocket Launch Tuesday Morning
What: Falcon 9 rocket launch at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County. When: Between 7 and 11 a.m. Tuesday, according to SpaceX. If
Carl Sagan’s team considered sending a nude photograph of a man and a pregnant woman on the Voyager Golden Record, but after the controversy over the nude Pioneer plaque, the final record used a silhouette instead
In late 1971, after NASA approved the idea of sending a message aboard Pioneer 10, Carl Sagan was given just three weeks to prepare it. Working with astronomer Frank Drake and artist Linda Salzman Sagan, he helped create a six-by-nine-inch gold-anodized aluminum plaque that was bolted to the spacecraft’s antenna support struts. The Pioneer plaque […]
Supercharging solar cells: Quantum dot-molecule hybrid states enable near-maximum efficiency
Solar panels have become more efficient over the years, but even the best designs still lose a large fraction of the energy they absorb. Scientists around the world have been searching for ways to capture …
Chaos after queen loss reveals the wasps that keep colonies running
When the loss of a queen wasp triggers a power struggle and social turmoil, colonies can survive the upheaval thanks to helpful wasps that pick up the slack, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
When a Soviet rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, scientists assumed it was gone for good — but nearly forty years later, the reflector strapped to its back answered a laser pulse from Earth as if no time had passed at all
On November 17, 1970, a Soviet unmanned mission called Luna 17 landed on the Sea of Rains, a vast basalt plain on the near side of the Moon. The lander deployed a remote-controlled rover called Lunokhod 1, the first robotic vehicle ever to operate on the surface of another world. The rover was, by every […]
What is the blue-white star next to the moon tonight?
Don’t miss Spica greet the waxing moon in the southern sky on May 26
New mathematical model predicts global population crash by 2064
In a new open-access study that I published with my late colleague Kostya Trachenko from Queen Mary University of London, I propose a surprisingly simple nonlinear mathematical equation that unifies 12,000 …
SpaceX launches rocket from Cape Canaveral on Memorial Day morning. See photos
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a batch of Starlink satellites on Memorial Day morning from Florida. See the photos.
Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot photograph was nearly never taken — Carl Sagan pushed NASA to turn the camera back toward Earth after the planetary mission was over, while engineers worried the Sun’s glare could damage the optics
On February 14, 1990, six billion kilometers from the sun, Voyager 1 swiveled around and took a photograph of Earth. In the frame, the planet appears as a speck less than a pixel wide, caught in a band of scattered sunlight. The image, which Carl Sagan later named the Pale Blue Dot, became one of […]
Scientists Just Turned Silkworm Silk Into a Near-Kevlar Supermaterial
Unlike previous attempts, the latest human-made version of silk keeps everything great about natural silk while ramping up its toughness and versatility.