Science

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A private spacecraft that was supposed to provide a lifeline to NASA’s Swift Observatory managed to get close to the sinking telescope and even took photographs more than a week after the rescue was abandoned. But the three-armed robotic rescuer had to move away due to low fuel, according to … Read more

Ángel Vázquez, director of telescope operations at the observatory, was standing outside the control room on the morning of December 1, 2020 when he heard a loud bang. He looked up in time to see the rest happen. A 900-ton instrument platform, suspended 500 feet above the dish on a handful of steel cables, broke … Read more

Mechanical watches have accompanied astronauts and cosmonauts into space for decades, but few contemporary watches can claim to have been developed specifically around the demands of extravehicular activity, like Konstantin Chaykin’s new SC02C. Born from the manufacturer’s collaboration with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, the chronograph has been tested during four spacewalks and is now … Read more

Let’s start with the figure that makes the rest of the story difficult to imagine: 200 billion. That’s about the number of rows of data a machine learning program created by a Pasadena high school student had to process. Each row is a moment when a retired NASA telescope captured a flash of infrared light … Read more

When we imagine glaciers, it’s easy to imagine vast expanses of white ice glistening under the sky. But not all glaciers take that shape. The world is covered by a different type, called rock glaciers: landforms in mountainous regions where masses of ice and rock coexist, hidden beneath a hard surface of rock and boulders. … Read more

Mercury, the smallest and least explored planet in the inner solar system, hides mysteries far greater than itself, and finally, scientists will soon get not one, but two spacecraft designed to decode this strange world. This is thanks to the BepiColombo mission, a joint project of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace … Read more

For the first time, physicists have measured the small quantum shift that an object acquires as it falls through Earth’s gravity, an effect of Einstein’s relativity that was predicted nearly a century ago but never observed. The researchers placed ultracold rubidium atoms in a superposition, a quantum state in which a single particle takes two … Read more

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WLOS) — What began as an undergraduate research project at the University of North Carolina at Asheville resulted in a discovery that earned the team recognition in an accredited peer-reviewed journal. ‘It was very surreal’: UNC Asheville researchers make discovery in drug-resistant staph. (WLOS) The team discovered a weakness in a protein that … Read more

In 2008, two physicists proposed that something strange should happen when graphene bends almost as much as the atoms allow. They argued that the curvature could unbalance the electrons, producing electrical polarization solely from the shape. If they were right, that meant that a wonder material (graphene has amazing strength, conductivity, flexibility and lightness) could … Read more