spacedaily.com

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181.
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
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▲ 0 · May 26
182.
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.
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▲ 0 · May 26
183.
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
184.
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
185.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
186.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
187.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
188.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
189.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
190.
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
191.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
192.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
193.
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.
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▲ 0 · May 25
194.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
195.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
196.
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
197.
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
198.
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
199.
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
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
200.
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
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▲ 0 · May 25
201.
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
202.
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
203.
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
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
204.
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
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
205.
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
206.
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.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
207.
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.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 25
208.
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.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 24
209.
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
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 24
210.
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