An epic battle between paintballs and a giant asteroid could one day save the Earth from an apocalyptic space rock impact. The novel asteroid-deflecting scheme proposes that a cloud of paintballs shot into space could knock a dangerous asteroid off a collision course with Earth. Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft…
Despite the ability to walk upright, early relatives of humanity represented by the famed “Lucy” fossil likely spent much of their time in trees, remaining very active climbers, researchers say. Humans are unique among living primates in that walking bipedally — on two feet — is humans’ chief mode of locomotion. This upright posture freed…
One of the lowest mass supermassive black holes ever observed in the middle of a galaxy has been identified, thanks to NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other observatories. The host galaxy is of a type not expected to harbor supermassive black holes, suggesting that this black hole, while related to its supermassive cousins, may…
Stars ripped from their home galaxies as they collide with other galaxies can get slung into giant invisible cocoons of dark matter, researchers say, which might explain mysterious radiation pervading the sky. These findings suggest the halos of dark matter surrounding galaxies are not completely dark after all, but contain a small number of stars,…
The center of our galaxy, as seen by the powerful Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) instrument in northern Chile, has been captured in a digital image that represents the largest catalog of the stars there to date, some 84 million of them (10 times more than earlier catalogs). The original image covers…
The helpfulness of grandmothers is the reason humans don’t die in their thirties the way chimpanzees do, new research shows – and may even explain our bigger brains. Computer simulations show that with only a little grandmotherly care, animals with chimpanzee lifespans evolve to reach a human level in less than 60,000 years. “Grandmothering was…
Researchers have observed in an experiment the exact steps bacterial genes take to evolve a new ability, unexpectedly adding a new twist on an old model
The European Space Agency has approved the first of its small science missions. Don’t let the description fool you, there is nothing small about the goals of Cheops. It’s a step towards finding habitable planets
Here’s something for raw-food aficionados to chew on: Cooked food might be a big reason humans were able to grow such large brains compared to their body size, scientists say. If modern human ancestors had eaten only raw food, they’d have to regularly feed more than nine hours a day, according to a study published…
Outside of science fiction, the topic of sex in space has received surprisingly scant attention. But it was science fiction that inspired Dr. Robert S. Richardson to write an article in the March 1956 issue of Sexology: The Magazine of Sex Science, wherein he describes his vision of what sexual relations might look like when…