Category Archives: Science and Health

Enceladus is a tiny moon of Saturn that sprays water vapor and ice grains into space from an ocean hidden beneath its icy crust — meaning a spacecraft can sample material from an alien sea without ever landing.

This is accurate, and a spacecraft has already done it. Enceladus, a moon of Saturn only about 500 kilometres across, has a global ocean of liquid water under a shell of ice. Through fractures near its south pole, that ocean vents continuously into space as a plume of water vapour and fine ice grains. Between […]

Science legend Stephen Hawking’s dad worried he was a slug who lounged around too much

In an upcoming biography of Stephen Hawking, author Graham Farmelo writes about Hawking’s upbringing and his parents, including dad Frank’s 1961 diary entry that said he was worried about his son’s…

Star Trek’s Biggest Mystery Was Answered By One Forgotten Episode

One of the coolest things about Star Trek is that this franchise has had plenty of world-building from the very beginning. This designation was still used in The Next Generation by Captain Picard and…

In 1908, something exploded in the sky over Siberia with hundreds of times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, flattening more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. When scientists finally reached the site years later, they found no crater at all

On the morning of 30 June 1908, an object from space exploded above the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia. It flattened roughly 2,150 square kilometres of forest, an area larger than Greater London, and tens of millions of trees were knocked down in a pattern that radiated outward from a single […]

Extreme 8.5-minute orbit reveals white dwarf being torn apart by its binary companion

A team of U.S. astronomers has observed a binary pair of white dwarfs where one star is actively devouring material from the other. Led by Emma Chickles at MIT, the researchers revealed one of the clearest …

The human genome contains traces of ancient viruses that infected our ancestors millions of years ago — and some of those viral leftovers were later repurposed into genes that help make human pregnancy possible

Both halves of this claim are well supported, and neither rests on a single study. About 8 percent of the human genome, by the standard estimate, consists of sequences left behind by ancient retroviruses. And among those sequences are a small number of genes that the body now uses to build the placenta. The viral […]

Massive ‘X’ and ‘V’ shapes will appear on the moon tonight — here’s how to see them

Here’s when to see a pair of massive letters shining on the lunar surface around May’s first quarter moon phase.

Research Paper Warns That There’s a Massive Experiment at Work to Geoengineer the Earth’s Climate

“We need to be extremely cautious.”

Unusual stars may be the leftovers of ancient galaxy gobbled up by the Milky Way

Unusual stellar remnants suggest the Milky Way might have eaten a galaxy called Loki billions of years ago, according to new research.

JPL’s management contract is suddenly up for grabs for the first time since the 1930s, and NASA’s own language shows why this is more than a routine procurement fight

For the first time since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s origins in the 1930s, Caltech’s hold on one of the most important institutions in American robotic space exploration is no longer automatic. NASA has announced that it will compete the next contract for managing and operating JPL, the federally funded research and development center in Southern […]