Friday, Sep 27th
Last update06:55:34 AM GMT
Science Glance
Four volunteers who spent more than a year living in a 1,700-square-foot space created by NASA to simulate the environment on Mars have emerged.
The members of the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog mission — or CHAPEA — walked through the door of their habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday to a round of applause.
“Hello. It’s actually just so wonderful to be able to say hello to you all,” CHAPEA commander Kelly Haston said to the assembled crowd.
Scientists in Bolivia are hoping to track glacial changes at lightning speed.
What if the song "Baby Shark" stopped after just two stanzas?
For non-fans of the catchy tune, that might sound like a dream. For a real-life Mommy Shark in Illinois, it's reality: She produced a baby without a Daddy Shark.
The epaulette shark pup hatched this summer at Brookfield Zoo, just west of Chicago. Its mother has been at the zoo since 2019; in that time, she's never shared a tank with a male.
It's a rare case of parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction, according to the zoo.
The latest species of spider found in the U.S. are huge, brightly colored and travel in a method described as "ballooning." And, according to new research, they're spreading out to new states around the country.
Researchers at Clemson University published a study on Joro spiders, coming to the conclusion that the species is spreading rapidly beyond the South Carolina area, and data shows they could inhabit most of the eastern U.S.
Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity.
The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.
Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.
Get ready for some shooting stars — this weekend is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower, the beloved astronomical event that sends bright streaks of light streaming across the night sky.
This year's show should be a good one, "mainly because the moon isn't going to interfere," says Michelle Nichols, director of public observing with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. "We can have different reasons why a meteor shower may be better one year versus the next, and a lot of times it's the phase of the moon."
Because the waning crescent moon will be just a little sliver that rises late, the sky will be dark, creating the ideal backdrop for the meteor shower's celestial fireworks.
Plus, the fact that the peak arrives on the weekend means that many folks can stay up late or get up before dawn without the usual worries about having to go to work after losing sleep.
It was just a normal day's flying for Alex Dietrich – until it wasn't. Streaking through the sky over the tranquil expanse of the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, the US Navy lieutenant commander was taking her F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet on a training mission with a colleague in another plane. Then came a voice through the crackle of the radio.
It was an operations officer aboard the warship USS Princeton, asking them to investigate a suspicious object flitting around: on several occasions, it had been spotted 80,000ft (24.2km) high, before suddenly dropping close to the sea and apparently vanishing.
When the two jets arrived at its last known location, close to the ocean's surface, the water seemed almost to be boiling. Moments later Dietrich saw it: what seemed to be a whitish, oblong object around 40ft (12m) long, hovering just above the water – like a wingless capsule, which she described as resembling a Tic Tac. As they edged in closer, it was gone, accelerating off into the sky at what seemed an impossible speed, leaving a glassy expanse of regular sea behind.
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