"There are also two name plates (one in blue and one in gold) on each spacecraft listing Rocket Lab team members who've contributed to the mission, making it possible to get to Mars," said McLaurin. Mounted on the solar panels, the plaques use shading to also display the Latin initials (NSHO) of the Rocket Lab motto and form the company's logo. Despite their diminutive size, each plate appears to include more than 200 names, including founder, president, and CEO Peter Beck.
When ultra-runners prepare for races that span hundreds of miles and last for days, they are not only challenging their determination and physical power. They are also exploring how far human physiology can be pushed. In a study published October 20 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, researchers reported that even elite endurance athletes cannot consistently exceed an average "metabolic ceiling" equal to 2.5 times their basal metabolic rate (BMR) in daily energy use.
To glean a country's, territory's, region's or an institution's contribution to an article, and to ensure that they are not counted more than once, the Nature Index uses Share, a fractional count that takes into account the share of authorship on each article. The total Share available per article is 1, which is shared among all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally.
Arizona-based amateur astronomer Andrew McCarthy shared the now-viral image on Reddit, calling it the "most preposterously fake-looking real photo I've ever captured." The gorgeous image, fittingly titled "The Fall of Icarus" - and which you can buy as a print to support McCarthy right here - shows "my friend transiting an active region on the Sun in freefall," he wrote in the caption.
Ever since it was disclosed that financier Leon Black had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million for tax and estate planning in 2014, six years after the latter pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges, I have been fascinated by the notion that the disgraced sex offender, who made little outward intellectual contribution to the world, had all these highly valuable forms of expertise. Many powerful people have claimed that Epstein was some sort of charismatic polymath.
However, that decision has now left the crew of Shenzhou-21, astronauts Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang without a vessel to return to Earth in case of another space emergency. On Friday, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced that the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft will be launched 'at an appropriate time in the future,' with the likely goal of bringing replacements for the Shenzhou-21 team.
In the version of the article initially published, in Extended Data Fig. 10e, the immunohistochemistry staining for FOSL1 on the treated sample (Trametinib) contained incorrect data that were identical to those shown in Fig. 3d but acquired at different magnification. This mistake was due to an error in saving the image under the wrong name following its microscopic acquisition. Figure 1 in the Supplementary Information accompanying this amendment shows the original and corrected Extended Data Fig. 10e.
About 170 Starshield satellites built by SpaceX for the US government's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) have been sending signals in the wrong direction, a satellite researcher found. The SpaceX-built spy satellites are helping the NRO greatly expand its satellite surveillance capabilities, but the purpose of these signals is unknown. The signals are sent from space to Earth in a frequency band that's allocated internationally for Earth-to-space and space-to-space transmissions. There have been no public complaints of interference caused by the surprising Starshield emissions.
When a swathe of Europe goes dark for over two minutes during next summer's total solar eclipse, some lucky travelers will be able to watch the shadow of the moon sweep across a landscape of glaciers from the deck of their explorer yacht. That's thanks to expedition yacht charter specialists EYOS Expeditions, which unveiled a one-of-a-kind opportunity to charter a yacht to witness the eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026, from one of the world's most untamed wildernesses: East Greenland's Scoresby Sund.
Like any scientific field, it has its own jargon and buzzwordsand terms with meanings that can be not only odd but downright counterintuitive. The most obvious one is astronomers' use of the word metal to mean any element heavier than helium. Lithium? Metal. Oxygen? Metal. Carbon? That's a metal, too, as far as astronomy is concerned. Using a single term to cover these heavier-than-helium elements.
Under a hazy gray sky on the first day of 1995, the Draupner natural gas platform in the North Sea was struck by something that had long been relegated to maritime folklore: an 84-foot wall of water that hurled massive equipment across the deck and warped steel supports. The Draupner wave provided the first hard evidence that rogue waves were very real.
A blast from the Sun kept Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the pad as the Northern Lights forced NASA to halt the launch. It has not been a good week for Jeff Bezos' rocket. A planned launch on November 9 was scrubbed due to weather, and the Blue Origin team had hoped to get the New Glenn off the pad on November 12, but it was not to be. While skywatchers were admiring an aurora, NASA scientists were fretting about the effects of the solar storm.
Heads up, Bay Area. The Northern Lights are back. After lighting up skies across Novato, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, and San Rafael last night, the aurora borealis could return tonight (Wednesday, Nov. 12) thanks to a rare geomagnetic storm. When to look: 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. (best around midnight)Where: Look north and find a dark spot away from city lights.
According to the US Geological Survey, a 3.6M earthquake rumbled just south of Vallejo Thursday afternoon, and miled shaking was felt in San Francisco, the East Bay, and parts of the North Bay. The earthquake appears to have occurred along the Southampton Fault, which appears like a northern extension of the Calaveras Fault a fault running under the East Bay and down to Hollister, just east of the Hayward Fault.
Researchers used what's known as the biobehavioral aging clock framework to quantify biobehavioral age gaps (BBAGs), by using artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on thousands of health and behavioral profiles. These models can predict a person's biological age based on physical markers such as hypertension, diabetes, sleep problems, and sensory loss, as well as protective factors including education, cognition, functional ability, and physical activity.
The U.S. Army is entering a new era of aviation defined by speed and advanced technology. From the upgraded AH-64E Apache Guardian to next-generation systems like the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) and the CH-47F Chinook Block II, the Army's newest aircraft are built to dominate on the battlefield. These are just two of the platforms that the Army is pushing going forward; however, there are still legacy platforms that see the sky with a storied service history.
If a TV programme sets about sequencing the genome of Adolf Hitler the person in modern history who comes closest to a universally agreed-upon personification of evil there are at the very least two questions you want the producers to ask themselves. First: is it possible? And second, the Jurassic Park question: just because scientists can, should they? Channel 4's two-part documentary Hitler's DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator is not the first time the self-consciously edgy British broadcaster has gone there.
Scientists have long speculated what caused the downfall of the Neanderthals, but a new study suggests they never truly went extinct at all. Scientists in Italy and Switzerland claim the ancient group of archaic humans didn't experience a 'true extinction' because their DNA exists in people today. Over as little as 10,000 years, our species, Homo sapeins, mated and produced offspring with Neanderthals as part of a gradual 'genetic assimilation'.
Where does all this dust come from? It's thought to be the result of erosion caused by the winds. Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, dust particles can be difficult to move, but larger particles can become more easily airborne if winds are turbulent enough, later taking smaller dust motes with them. Perseverance and previous Mars rovers have mostly witnessed wind vortices that were associated with either dust devils or convection, during which warm air rises.
Researchers have detected what they say is the strongest evidence yet of a coronal mass ejection (CME) coming from a star other than our Sun. CMEs are massive bursts of fast-moving plasma that can be detected thanks to the characteristic radio signal they produce. However, despite decades of searching, these signals have only been identified from the Sun. Now a team has identified a similar signal coming from a distant star in the Milky Way.
