Top NASA officials have picked a leading candidate for the agency’s next major mission: construction of a new outpost that would send astronauts farther from Earth than at any time in history. The so-called “gateway spacecraft” would hover in orbit on the far side of the moon, support a small astronaut crew and function as…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has produced one of its most extraordinary views of the Universe to date. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, the picture captures a mass of galaxies stretching back almost to the time when the first stars began to shine. But this was no simple point and snap – some of the…
Last summer the last Space Shuttle took its last space flight, but last week it took its last worldly one. It ended a generation’s era of space marvel, which turned out to take a very different path from that of the previous generation. During the 1950s and 1960s, space exploration was primarily a proxy for…
If you have an iPad, you can take a closer look at one of history’s greatest minds. The National Museum of Health & Medicine, Chicago released an app that displays slides of Albert Einstein’s brain. The app is for sale to researchers and curious iPad users alike, and all profits are going to the Chicago…
Astronomers in Germany have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to help them chart and explain the structure and dynamics of the universe around us with unprecedented accuracy. The team, led by Francisco Kitaura of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, report their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Scientists…
Chimps may be similar to us in many ways but they can’t compete when it comes to brain size. Now for the first time we can see when the differences emerge by tracking the brain development of unborn chimps. Researchers in Japan subjected a pregnant chimp to a 3D ultrasound to gather images of the…
The top ocean predators in the North Pacific could lose as much as 35% of their habitat by the end of the century as a result of climate change , according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The analysis took data compiled from tracking 4,300 open-ocean animals over a decade and…
Adam Steltzner is a rocker-turned-NASA engineer who helped take the country’s cool new Curiosity rover to the surface of Mars. “I’m so thankful to Clara Ma for suggesting the name ‘Curiosity.’ It embodies a fundamental attribute that defines us as humans,” Steltzner begins, when asked to explain why Curiosity matters. “Why do we explore? It’s…
The man known to a generation of Americans as “The Science Guy” is condemning efforts by some Christian groups to cast doubts on evolution and lawmakers who want to bring the Bible into science classrooms. Bill Nye, a mechanical engineer and star of the popular 1990s TV show “Bill Nye The Science Guy,” has waded…
We like to believe that more information allows us to make more informed decisions, to be more knowledgeable. That’s wrong: knowledge does not grow with information access.