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631.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
632.
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
633.
Many astronauts describe a quiet realization when they look down at Earth from orbit — that the borders and political lines we treat as permanent are invisible from above
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▲ 0 · May 25
634.
Consciousness might not be something the brain creates — it might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought — and one of the most credentialed neuroscientists alive is now arguing that mainstream science has been wrong about it for a century
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▲ 0 · May 25
635.
Astrophysicists have a quiet ranking of Hollywood’s space movies — and the films they consider most accurate aren’t always the ones audiences remember as realistic
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
636.
NASA is building a nuclear reactor for the Moon by 2030 — and testing the nuclear propulsion that could carry humans to Mars in the decade after — under a new directive that revives a space-nuclear ambition the agency has been quietly chasing since Apollo
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▲ 0 · May 25
637.
Scientists think they may have found the remains of an entire galaxy that the Milky Way absorbed billions of years ago — 20 unusual stars hiding inside our own galactic disk, possibly the leftovers of a small galaxy our own home swallowed when it was still young
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▲ 0 · May 25
638.
In 1518 in Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and began to dance, and within a month roughly 400 people were dancing alongside her — some of them, according to later accounts, until they collapsed and died — and no one has ever fully explained why
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▲ 0 · May 25
639.
Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the surface of the Moon using a tiny kit he carried aboard with NASA’s quiet blessing, pouring wine that curled slowly upward in one-sixth gravity — and NASA then asked him to keep it off the air to avoid inflaming a lawsuit already underway over a Bible reading from orbit
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▲ 0 · May 25
640.
In 1908 something exploded over a remote part of Siberia with the force of roughly 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, flattened 80 million trees, and was heard 600 miles away — and more than a century later, scientists still cannot fully agree on whether it was an asteroid, a comet, or something else entirely
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▲ 0 · May 25
641.
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old — the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.
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▲ 0 · May 25
642.
Every GPS satellite is launched with a clock deliberately set to run slow, because Einstein’s relativity speeds it up by about 38 microseconds a day once in orbit — and without that built-in correction, your phone’s location would drift by roughly ten kilometres a day.
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▲ 0 · May 25
643.
Olympus Mons on Mars is a volcano more than two and a half times the height of Everest, but its slopes rise so gradually over hundreds of kilometres that a person standing on it might not realize they were on the tallest volcano in the solar system at all.
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▲ 0 · May 24
644.
French scientist Michel Siffre spent two months alone in a cave with no clock, no calendar, and no sunlight — and when his team finally told him the experiment was over, he thought he still had nearly a month left underground
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▲ 0 · May 24
645.
Helium was discovered on the Sun 27 years before anyone found it on Earth — spotted as an unexplained yellow line in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse and named after Helios, the Greek sun god, long before the gas was identified in any mineral on this planet.
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▲ 0 · May 24
646.
In 1990, after years of lobbying by Carl Sagan, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from about 6 billion kilometres away and photographed Earth as a pale blue speck smaller than a single pixel — an image NASA had repeatedly resisted because it offered little scientific value, but that became one of the most famous photographs ever taken.
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▲ 0 · May 24
647.
Voyager 1 is now so far from Earth that a signal traveling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it — so when engineers send a command, they can wait nearly two days to know whether the spacecraft responded
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▲ 0 · May 24
648.
Almost half of women in their 60s and 70s in Japan now prefer getting personal advice from AI rather than another human — the only age group in the survey to make that choice — and the country’s elderly isolation crisis is the unstated context
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▲ 0 · May 24
649.
China is sending an astronaut to its space station for a full year — a national record — as Beijing races toward a 2030 crewed moon landing, two years behind NASA’s target
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▲ 0 · May 24
650.
The price tag on Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield just jumped to $1.2 trillion in a new congressional analysis — seven times the administration’s number — with a quiet caveat that the system may not actually do what it was pitched to do
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▲ 0 · May 24
651.
The first all-female spacewalk in history did not happen until October 2019, fifty-eight years after Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth — and an earlier all-female attempt seven months before was reassigned because only one medium spacesuit torso was ready on the station
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▲ 0 · May 24
652.
There is a moment, in most adults’ lives, when intuition turns out to have been right about something important, and another moment, often in the same lives, when intuition turns out to have been catastrophically wrong, and the neuroscience that has begun to explain the difference is one of the more useful things the cognitive sciences have done in the last two decades.
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▲ 0 · May 24
653.
The Voyager Golden Record carries greetings in 55 languages — a deliberate attempt to send a small sample of human voices into deep space long after the spacecraft fell silent.
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▲ 0 · May 24
654.
Before he climbed the ladder for the last time, the final astronaut to walk on the Moon knelt and traced his daughter’s initials into the lunar dust with one finger — three letters that, with no wind or rain to disturb them, may sit there undisturbed for fifty thousand years.
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▲ 0 · May 24
655.
A NASA satellite launched in 1976 carries a Carl Sagan–designed plaque sealed inside its core, mapping Earth’s continents 268 million years ago, at launch, and 8.4 million years from now — and that last date is no accident, because it’s roughly when the satellite is expected to fall back to Earth and finally be opened.
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▲ 0 · May 24
656.
The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs struck what is now Mexico with such force that it blasted molten ejecta high above the atmosphere before it rained back down across the planet, and many of the survivors were small, sheltered creatures — including early mammals on the line that would eventually lead to us.
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▲ 0 · May 24
657.
A tiny jellyfish can reverse its own life cycle when injured or starving, turning back into its younger self instead of dying of old age like everything else
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▲ 0 · May 24
658.
Atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit slowly eats spacecraft surfaces, and the ISS survives because engineers learned to coat, test, and replace the materials most vulnerable to it
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▲ 0 · May 24
659.
The Vela satellites were built to catch secret nuclear tests, but they accidentally recorded flashes from deep space that opened a new branch of astrophysics
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▲ 0 · May 24
660.
Webb just clocked nearly 9,000 young star clusters and found the biggest ones break from their birth clouds in 5 million years, a timing clue that could reshape how astronomers model galaxies growing up
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 24