spacedaily.com

RSS Atom JSON

601.
Adding a banana to a berry smoothie can cancel out roughly 84% of the antioxidants the berries were supposed to deliver — and the reason is the same enzyme that turns bananas brown after they’re peeled
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
602.
A drilling expedition off Nantucket has confirmed a massive freshwater reservoir buried beneath the Atlantic seafloor — stretching from New Jersey to Maine, hypothesized since the 1960s, and holding enough drinkable water to supply New York City for roughly 800 years
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
603.
The paper that explained why every living thing on Earth exists was rejected by 15 journals before anyone took it seriously — and the idea it contained is stranger than most science fiction
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
604.
A genuine “once in a blue moon” event arrives this Sunday, May 31 — the only monthly Blue Moon between now and the very end of 2028 — and this one will pass right next to the bright orange heart of Scorpius in the predawn sky
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
605.
A space telescope orbiting Earth just picked up the same strange signature buried in every kind of cosmic ray it can detect — and it’s a fingerprint physicists have been quietly waiting on since 1912
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
606.
A research vessel mapping the Mediterranean floor off the coast of Sicily has just uncovered something the existing maps of the region don’t show — and it’s been sitting there, just kilometers from one of the most populated coastlines in Europe, the whole time.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
607.
The human body replaces almost all of its cells over a roughly 7-10 year period — but the neurons in your cerebral cortex are almost certainly the same age as you are
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
608.
Microsoft built an anechoic chamber so quiet that the background noise drops below the threshold of human hearing, and nobody has been able to sit inside it for more than 45 minutes because the brain begins to hallucinate when the only sounds left are your own heartbeat and lungs
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
609.
For decades two spacecraft drifting out of the solar system were being nudged off course by a force no one could explain — until physicists traced it to the faint heat radiating from the probes themselves.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
610.
The Opportunity rover’s famous last words — “my battery is low and it’s getting dark” — were never actually sent from Mars. The real story of where that sentence came from is stranger, and somehow sadder
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
611.
In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — but he did not land inside Vostok 1. He ejected and parachuted to Earth separately, and Soviet officials omitted that fact from official records because aviation record rules required the pilot to land with the craft
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
612.
When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died within hours, after Sputnik 2’s cabin overheated.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
613.
On 22 October 2017, a single lightning flash crossed five US states in 7.39 seconds, travelled 829 kilometres from Texas to near Kansas City, and produced more than 116 cloud-to-ground strikes along its path, an event approximately fifty times longer than a typical lightning bolt that was missed at the time and only identified through a 2024 reanalysis of archived satellite data.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
614.
A 36-year sweep of orbital debris has found the solar threshold where Earth’s upper atmosphere starts pulling space junk down faster, just as mega-constellations crowd low orbit
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
615.
Deep beneath Antarctica, researchers drill ice cores filled with tiny bubbles of ancient air, sealed into the ice for hundreds of thousands of years — letting them sample the atmosphere of a world no living human ever breathed.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 26
616.
In 1986, a freshwater lake in Cameroon released a cloud of carbon dioxide that killed 1,746 people in a single night, and that lake is one of only three on Earth known to be capable of this, the largest of which sits beneath roughly two million people.”
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
617.
Astronauts come home from long stays on the International Space Station measurably taller, their spines stretching by a few centimetres without gravity to compress them — though the extra height usually disappears soon after they return to Earth.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
618.
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
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
619.
Michael Collins, dubbed by the press “the loneliest man in history” while orbiting the far side of the Moon for roughly forty-seven minutes at a time, gently corrected the description — he said he felt isolated, but never lonely
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
620.
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft sent a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere that kept transmitting for just 58 minutes as it fell, returning the first direct readings from inside the giant planet before rising heat and pressure silenced it for good
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
621.
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
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
622.
The human brain accounts for about two per cent of body weight and consumes about twenty per cent of the body’s total energy every day — and that consumption barely changes whether you are solving differential equations or staring at a wall
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
623.
A common dietary supplement — omega-3, the kind found in fish oil and flax — has been shown across nearly 4,000 people to reduce aggression by up to 28%, whether it’s the heat-of-the-moment kind or the kind people plan in advance
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
624.
The Arecibo message — humanity’s most famous deliberate radio message to another civilization — was aimed at a star cluster about 25,000 light-years away in 1974, meaning even an immediate reply would not reach Earth until around 52,000 CE
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
625.
In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
626.
The tallest known living thing on Earth is a coastal redwood named Hyperion that stands 380 feet tall in a hidden grove in California, and its exact location is kept secret by the National Park Service because the last time tourists found a record-holding redwood they trampled its root system so badly the tree began dying.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
627.
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
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
628.
SPHEREx more than doubled the confirmed population of heavily reddened quasars at cosmic noon — and the new sample may catch supermassive black holes as they begin clearing the dust around them
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
629.
Human creativity may have been forged by hardship rather than abundance — according to a new study of 146,000-year-old stone tools found in central China and dated to one of the harshest Ice Ages of early human history
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
630.
Evidence of ancient life has just been found buried inside an asteroid crater — and the discovery suggests the warm lakes created by major impacts may have been some of the original cradles of life on Earth
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25