Science

  After a few delays, SpaceX launched its second Falcon Heavy rocket yesterday evening. This was SpaceX’s first commercial Falcon Heavy launch, as last year’s test payload was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster. Another important distinction: All three of the Falcon Heavy boosters returned safely to Earth. In 2018, the center …

NASA’s Twins Study brought ten teams of researchers from around the country together to observe what physiological, molecular and cognitive changes could happen to a human from exposure to spaceflight hazards. Retired NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and his identical twin brother Mark, participated in the investigation, conducted by NASA’s Human …

Russell Steele The OneWeb satellite has been described to be about the size of a beer refrigerator. That may be hard for some to visualize in the above graphic, so here is a beer refrigerator sold on Amazon. The SpaceX Starlink satellite is reported to be 1.1 meters (39in) long …

Metallic asteroids are the cooled cores of disrupted planetesimals. They originated early in the history of our Solar System when planets were beginning to form. University of California Santa Cruz planetary researchers Jacob Abrahams and Professor Francis Nimmo think that as the metal cooled and solidified, volcanoes spewing liquid iron …

From the ground, the dance of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, can look peaceful. But those shimmering sheets of colored lights are the product of violent collisions between Earth’s atmosphere and particles from the Sun. Understanding the contribution that aurora make to the total amount of energy that enters …

A multinational team of researchers has successfully sequenced and analyzed the genome of durum wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. durum), a cereal grain mainly used for pasta production. Durum wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. durum). Image credit: Christine Dautin. Durum wheat was established as a prominent crop roughly 1,500 to 2,000 years …

Vitamin D — which exists in two forms: D2 (ergocalciferol) and D3 (cholecalciferol) — helps regulate the amount of calcium and phosphate in the body. Vitamin D toxicity is rare, but patients and clinicians must be aware of the risks of vitamin D use to limit complications related to hypercalcemia, …

An international team of researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom has discovered a new species of pig-footed bandicoot which has been extinct for more than half a century. Chaeropus yirratji. Image credit: Peter Schouten / Western Australian Museum. The pig-footed bandicoot (Chaeropus ecaudatus) was unique, and unlike any other …

Neanderthals and woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) co-existed in similar geographic and environmental European settings during the Middle and Upper Pleistocene epochs and both were direct descendants of African ancestors, although both fully evolved and adapted in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene. A new study, published in the journal Human Biology, …

  It has been more than a year since SpaceX successfully completed the first demo flight of the long-awaited Falcon Heavy, and today could be its first commercial flight. Following a last-minute delay, SpaceX expects to launch the Arabsat-6A from NASA’s historic Pad 39A this evening. The Falcon Heavy makes …