spacedaily.com

RSS Atom JSON

541.
In a Beijing laboratory, 25 volunteers spent a week learning to fly with feathered virtual-reality wings — flapping to stay aloft, swerving through rings, swatting falling balls — and by the end, their brains were processing images of wings the same way they process images of real human limbs
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 28
542.
In 2018, a Chinese biophysicist announced he had gene-edited twin girls using CRISPR. The scientific consensus is that what he actually did was something else
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 28
543.
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 28
544.
In 1811, the planners of Manhattan’s street grid accidentally built one of the largest sun-aligned monuments in the world — and four times a year, the setting sun lines up perfectly with the city’s east-west streets, in an event Neil deGrasse Tyson named Manhattanhenge
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 28
545.
Social science has a replication problem — a new massive study found that only half of published findings hold up when researchers try to repeat them and many that made it into textbooks
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 28
546.
Earth is quietly dusted with thousands of tonnes of space material every year, most of it as grains smaller than sand — and some of it can be sifted from the grit of ordinary roof gutters, tiny meteorites hiding in plain sight in cities.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 28
547.
75% of Americans say they would trust AI shopping recommendations less if results were sponsored — which means OpenAI just made a decision that could structurally damage the thing that makes it valuable
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 28
548.
The makers of the Voyager Golden Record could not assume an alien would understand minutes or seconds, so the playback speed engraved on its cover is defined against a single, unchanging frequency of the hydrogen atom — a clock written into the physics of the universe.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
549.
Neptune was found not by anyone scanning the night sky but by mathematics — Urbain Le Verrier noticed Uranus being tugged off its predicted path, worked out where the hidden planet had to be, and astronomers in Berlin who pointed a telescope at that patch of sky found Neptune within a degree of his prediction that same night.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
550.
When Vera Rubin measured the spin of galaxies, she found their outer stars moving so fast that visible matter alone could not hold them in place — one of the clearest early signs that most of every galaxy is made of something nobody has ever seen.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
551.
The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs happened to strike a shallow seabed rich in sulphur and buried hydrocarbons, throwing soot and aerosols into the sky — and researchers argue the same rock hitting most other places might not have ended their reign.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
552.
NOAA has placed an 82 per cent probability that El Niño will emerge in the central Pacific between May and July 2026, the climate state that in 1997-98 caused more than 20,000 deaths worldwide and approximately US$36 billion in damage, that in 2015-16 produced what was then the warmest year on record and the most extensive Amazon drought yet measured, and that has accompanied every one of the ten warmest years in the global temperature record, all of which have occurred since 2015
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
553.
In 1964, a quiet British physicist named Peter Higgs proposed the existence of an invisible field permeating the entire universe — the thing that gives every particle of matter its mass — and it took another 48 years before scientists at CERN finally proved he was right, in a discovery that completed our most fundamental theory of how the universe is built
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
554.
The Human Genome Project was declared complete in 2003 — but about 8% of human DNA was still missing, including some of the regions most critical to chromosome stability and immunity, and it took another nineteen years to finally read it all
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
555.
In 1992, the number of confirmed planets outside our solar system was zero — and as of this year, NASA’s exoplanet archive lists more than 6,000 of them, with the lead scientist on the archive predicting the number could hit 100,000 within the next seven years
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
556.
There is a spot in the South Pacific so far from any coastline that when the International Space Station passes overhead, the nearest human beings may be the astronauts in orbit — not anyone on land.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
557.
China has just sent stem-cell-grown structures resembling early human embryos to its space station — the first experiment of its kind in orbit — to find out whether humans can actually reproduce beyond Earth
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
558.
A new meta-analysis of 27 studies just changed what I’m most afraid of about sugar — it turns out the craving isn’t the worst part
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
559.
Paleontologists in New Mexico have just dug up a two-legged, beak-mouthed reptile that looks almost exactly like a small dinosaur — except it lived more than a hundred million years before any dinosaur evolved that body plan, and it wasn’t a dinosaur at all, but a distant cousin of modern crocodiles
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
560.
The Bronze Age civilization that built the city of Akrotiri on Santorini around 1600 BCE appears to have known a volcanic eruption was coming and evacuated almost everyone before it happened — archaeologists have found no bodies in the ruins, just abandoned belongings — and to this day nobody fully understands what warning signs they read, or where they went after they left
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
561.
In 1816, a French physician named René Laennec, embarrassed to press his ear against the chest of a young female patient, rolled up a sheet of paper into a tube and listened through it instead — and that improvised paper cylinder, which let him hear her heart more clearly than direct contact had, became the original prototype for the stethoscope and quietly reshaped two centuries of medicine
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
562.
Scientists tracked 8,000 supermassive black holes across the universe and found most slowed their growth over the same 10 billion years — not because of any force acting on them, but because the universe ran low on the cold gas they needed to keep feeding
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
563.
The largest known organism on Earth isn’t a whale or a tree — it’s a single fungus growing underground in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, covering nearly four square miles, mostly invisible, estimated to be between two and eight thousand years old and slowly killing the forest above it from beneath
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
564.
For more than thirty years after his death in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was kept in a series of jars in the basement of a Kansas pathologist who had removed it during the autopsy without permission — and when researchers finally examined it in the 1980s and 1990s, one study found that a specific region called the inferior parietal lobule was about fifteen percent wider than the average brain
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
565.
When Soviet engineers landed Venera 13 on the surface of Venus in 1982, they expected the probe to survive maybe thirty minutes in the planet’s lead-melting heat and crushing pressure — it survived 127 minutes and sent back the first color photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
566.
The Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 with a mirror so precisely ground that it was actually defective — the curve was off by about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair — producing blurry images for the first three and a half years of its mission, until astronauts on a 1993 Space Shuttle mission installed corrective optics in orbit and turned it into the most productive telescope in history
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
567.
The most distant human-made object in the universe is Voyager 1, currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth — and its plutonium power source is losing about four watts of output every year, meaning sometime around 2030 the spacecraft will quietly stop transmitting forever, ending the longest continuous human conversation ever conducted across cosmic distances
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
568.
In 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon with about 25 seconds of fuel remaining and three program alarms blaring in the cabin — and one of the engineers who built the guidance system later said the only reason it worked was a young woman named Margaret Hamilton, who had insisted the software be able to ignore tasks it couldn’t complete
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
569.
For thousands of years, a giant iron meteorite lay in the far north of Greenland, where generations of Inuit travelled to it as their only source of metal for knives and harpoons — until the American explorer Robert Peary spent three years hauling the 31-ton mass to a ship in the 1890s and sold it to a New York museum, where it still sits today
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27
570.
In 1961, a young chimpanzee captured in Cameroon and trained at a New Mexico air force base became the first hominin to travel into space and return alive — and the program kept him publicly nameless throughout the mission, as if to avoid the grief of losing a named chimp on national television, only calling him Ham after he came home
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 27