Science

Titan was called an ocean world for more than fifteen years, but a reanalysis of Cassini’s radio tracking published in Nature has quietly taken the ocean away — the moon’s tidal response lags Saturn’s pull by about fifteen hours, which fits slush and small pockets of warm water rather than a global sea

Titan was called an ocean world for more than fifteen years, but a reanalysis of Cassini's radio tracking published in Nature has quietly taken the ocean away — the moon's tidal response lags Saturn's pull by about fifteen hours, which fits slush and small pockets of warm water rather than a global sea

For nearly two decades, scientists thought that Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, hid a global ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface. A new study says the ocean probably isn’t there. Instead, Titan’s interior may be mostly slushy ice, with small pockets of warm water rather than a large sea. The story begins in 2008, … Read more

‘Earliest evidence’ of elephant butchery at Olduvai Gorge shared in new study

'Earliest evidence' of elephant butchery at Olduvai Gorge shared in new study

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Elephants are widely worshiped by many people today, but a recent study suggests that early humans slaughtered them for survival almost 2 million years ago. A group of international researchers found what they describe as “the earliest direct evidence of proboscidean butchery,” including a newly identified elephant … Read more

SpaceX rocket’s moon crash highlights ‘a tangible operational risk’ of lunar settlement

SpaceX rocket's moon crash highlights 'a tangible operational risk' of lunar settlement

Moon dust has settled after the body of a 4.5-ton SpaceX rocket crashed into the terrain near Einstein Crater on August 5. That impact site was photographed by South Korea’s lunar-orbiting Danuri spacecraft, as well as NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). A Chinese commercial space debris monitoring satellite also reportedly tracked and recorded the 5,400 … Read more

Of the 27 songs NASA sent into space aboard the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, one is a Georgian song called Chakrulo, sung by two soloists over a full choir in harmonies tuned to intervals that don’t exist on a piano — and this November, the spacecraft carrying it becomes the first human-made object ever to travel a full light-day from Earth

Of the 27 songs NASA sent into space aboard the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, one is a Georgian song called Chakrulo, sung by two soloists over a full choir in harmonies tuned to intervals that don't exist on a piano — and this November, the spacecraft carrying it becomes the first human-made object ever to travel a full light-day from Earth

I must have been eight or nine the first time an adult told me, with unmistakable pride, that a Georgian song floated somewhere beyond the edge of the solar system. I remember nodding my head the way children do when a fact is clearly assumed to matter to them, without really understanding what it means. … Read more

Earth and Venus are almost twins in size, mass and gravity. Earth’s highest mountains are capped with frozen water; Venus’s may be coated in metallic frost containing lead and bismuth sulfides. Somehow, two remarkably similar planets took radically different paths—and scientists still don’t know exactly when or why.

Earth and Venus are almost twins in size, mass and gravity. Earth's highest mountains are capped with frozen water; Venus's may be coated in metallic frost containing lead and bismuth sulfides. Somehow, two remarkably similar planets took radically different paths—and scientists still don't know exactly when or why.

If we put Earth and Venus side by side, the family resemblance is unusually close. Venus has about 95 percent of Earth’s diameter, 81.5 percent of its mass, and about 90 percent of Earth’s surface gravity. A 75-kilogram person on Earth would press down on the ground with about the same force as a 68-kilogram … Read more