Science

  The prevailing scientific wisdom on Mars, based on information gathered by the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers, as well as via multiple orbiting satellites, is that the planet once had substantial reserves of liquid water on its surface. The question of what happened to those reserves, and how Mars …

  Most people like eating meat, but the ecological impacts of raising livestock to feed seven billion humans is not insignificant. So, companies around the world are trying to come up with alternative ways of producing meat and meat-like materials. That’s all happened on Earth, but what about meat-loving astronauts? …

A previously unknown family, genus and species of microinvertebrates has been found in amber from the Dominican Republic. Nicknamed ‘mold pigs,’ these tiny creatures lived some 30 million years ago (Paleogene period) and had features of both mites and tardigrades. A mold pig (Sialomorpha dominicana). Image credit: George Poinar Jr. …

Scientists have discovered an antibiotic produced by a symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacterium from a tropical forest in Mexico that may help lead to a ‘plant prebiotic.’ Rhizobium sp. forms nodules on bean plant roots, resulting in a more robust plant (right) than on the left. Image credit: Dmitrii Y. Travin. The …

Using data from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, a team of scientists has calculated the total pressure from particles in the outer region of the Solar System, known as the heliosheath — and it was found to be greater than expected. NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, one in the heliosheath and the other just …

NASA’s Curiosity rover recently discovered rocks enriched in mineral salts within the 3.7-billion-year-old Gale Crater on Mars. According to a new paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, these salt-rich rocks represent evidence of shallow briny ponds that went through episodes of overflow and drying. Lithology of sulfate enrichments in Gale …

The world’s last population of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) lived on Wrangel Island, currently some 140 km off the coast of the Chukotka mainland in northeastern Siberia. They went extinct 3,700 years ago and, according to the frequency of their remains from the island, the extinction was extremely abrupt. In a …

  You can’t take a trip to the real moon, at least not right now. You might be able to visit the surface virtually before long, though. NASA has released a visual data set that it calls the “CGI Moon Kit,” which will allow designers to create authentic moonscapes in …

An international team of ornithologists has discovered a new species of the honeyeater genus Myzomela in the highlands of the Lesser Sunda island of Alor, southeast Indonesia. Two individuals of the Alor myzomela (Myzomela prawiradilagae) perched in Eucalyptus urophylla tree at 1,250 m near Manmas-Subo, Alor Island, Indonesia, in April …

  NASA’s InSight lander arrived on Mars in 2018, after which the team spent months carefully surveying its surroundings and deploying a suite of instruments that will peer inside the red planet. One of those instruments is a seismometer, which has recorded the rumbles of another planet for the first …