In case you’re feeling the void of Moon missions, empty since the return of the Artemis II astronauts from their trip around the far side of the Moon six months ago, NASA has you covered. The agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launched Artemis II on April 1, carrying a crew of four on the … Read more
SpaceX’s Starship is on the cusp of a major milestone as the company prepares to send the megarocket into orbit for the first time. The launch window will open at 8:15 a.m. ET on Monday, September 28 and will remain open for 75 minutes. Yesterday, SpaceX shared photos of Starship fully stacked on the Starbase … Read more
We have yet to find definitive evidence that there is biological life on today’s Mars, but calling it a dead planet isn’t exactly accurate. Since the first Viking lander touched down in 1976, a rotating cast of humanity’s robotic envoys has worked in and around the Red Planet, and as access to space becomes cheaper … Read more
2026-09-24T13:52:30.915Z Dress rehearsal for Starship Flight 14 is underway now. Starship sits on Starbase Pad 2 ahead of a wet dress rehearsal on September 24. (Image credit: SpaceX) Image credit: SpaceX Image credit: SpaceX Image credit: SpaceX The sun has risen on SpaceX’s towering Starship ahead of the launch of the rocket’s Flight 14 and … Read more
See 5 planets and the Harvest Moon lighting up the sky this week. Late September is shaping up to be one of the best times of the year for stargazing, and you don’t need a telescope or any special equipment to enjoy it. The five “naked eye” planets will be visible at various times this … Read more
Torque and changes in the LODAn axial torque Γz acting on the mantle causes a change in its rotation rate (ΔΩm) according to $${C}_{{\rm{m}}}\frac{{\rm{d}}\Delta {\varOmega }_{{\rm{m}}}}{{\rm{d}}t}={\varGamma }_{z},$$ (1) in which Cm = 7.13 × 1037 kg m2 is the axial moment of inertia of the mantle. ΔΩm corresponds to a change in the LOD (ΔLOD) $$\Delta {\rm{LOD}}=-\frac{2{\rm{\pi }}}{{\varOmega }_{{\rm{o}}}^{2}}\Delta {\varOmega }_{{\rm{m}}},$$ … Read more
The ocean covers more than 70 percent of our planet and remains largely unknown and unexplored. However, within its deep trenches and sunlit coral reefs lie creatures of unimaginable scale and power. Whether you’re wondering which beast dominates the deepest waters or what kind of creature has enough venom to cast 26 in minutes, these … Read more
Can a volcano cause the end of humanity? What would happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted now? What if Yellowstone suddenly went from bubbling geysers and spectacular landscapes to the site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history? Yellowstone National Park in the United States of America may be famous for its … Read more
Senckenberg-Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research, Senckenberganlage, Frankfurt, GermanyAriadna E. Morales, Evgeny V. Leushkin, Alexander Ben Hamadou, Alejandro Gonzales-Irribarren, Carola Greve, Leon Hilgers, Dimitrios-Georgios Kontopoulos, Shenglin Liu, Yury V. Malovichko, Tilman Schell & Michael HillerUniversity of Montpellier–CNRS–IRD, ISEM, Montpellier, FranceAriadna E. Morales & Sebastien J. PuechmailleTree of Life, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, UKYan Liang (梁妍), Eugene W. Myers, Mark Blaxter, Paul Davis, Matthieu Muffato, Guoying Qi & Emma C. TeelingDepartment of Ecology … Read more
MPRA designLibrary designTo generate the catalogue of fixed human-derived substitutions we used genotyping data from 139 non-human great apes15,68,69,70,71 (10 bonobos, 59 chimpanzees, 43 gorillas and 27 orangutans), all mapped to the human reference genome GRCh37. To restrict the analysis to high-confidence genotypes, we excluded variants that did not meet any of the following criteria: … Read more