Four astronauts are back home after a daring ride around the Moon
Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts…
New paper argues history, not mantle plume, powers Yellowstone
North America wouldn’t look much like it currently does without a tectonic plate that has largely been lost to the Earth’s geological history. The Farallon plate, which has since largely…
“Oobleck” still holds some surprises
Mixing corn starch and water in appropriate amounts produces a slurry that is liquid when stirred slowly but hardens when you punch it—a substance colorfully dubbed “oobleck.” (The name derives…
Oldest octopus fossil found to not be an octopusÂ
Pohlsepia mazonensis, a visually underwhelming fossil from Illinois, fundamentally broke our understanding of cephalopod evolution. Described in 2000 and hailed as the oldest known octopus in the fossil record, the…
Robot birds deployed in Grand Teton National Park for sexy time
Spring is here, and that can only mean one thing: the return of robot birds. In Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, rangers and conservationists are once again deploying specially designed…
Orion helium leak no threat to Artemis II reentry, but will require redesign
Apart from pesky issues with the spacecraft’s toilet and waste disposal system, most of the Artemis II mission has proceeded like clockwork. NASA has made few changes to the flight…
Clinical trial shows gene editing works for β-Thalassaemia, too
Almost as soon as researchers started exploring the capabilities of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, they recognized its potential use in targeted gene editing. But the intervening decades have seen slow progress…
“Negative” views of Broadcom driving thousands of VMware migrations, rival says
Amid customer dissatisfaction around Broadcom’s VMware takeover, rivals have been trying to lure customers from the leading virtualization firm. One of VMware’s biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens…
Ugandan chimps split into two factions, then killed rivals
In the 1970s, the late Jane Goodall observed a community of chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, breaking into two factions; the males in one group ended up killing all the males…
The gravity of their experience hasn’t quite set in for the Artemis II astronauts
On the home stretch of their nine-day mission, the four astronauts flying aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft are just beginning to reflect on their experience of flying beyond the Moon. Their…