Science

The ancient city of Elusa (Hebrew: Halutza) is located at the northern edge of the Negev desert and was established as a caravan station on the incense route controlled by Petra that runs from Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea. During excavations in the Halutza National Park, an international team of …

  Last December, the Earth got a Christmas present we weren’t even aware of. The second-most powerful asteroid detonation in 30 years struck on December 18, when a bolide exploded over the Bering Sea. The blast was an estimated 173kt — roughly 11.5x more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped …

  SpaceX is on a roll lately. After completing the first full test of its crew-ready Dragon capsule last week, the company is on the verge of launching the interplanetary Starship on its first test flight. Before you send a spacecraft into space, you need to figure out how to …

  If someone asks you what planet is closest to Earth, you’ll probably blurt out Venus. That’s a perfectly normal thing to say, but it’s also wrong. Numerous websites and even NASA itself say Venus is our closest planetary neighbor. A new article in Physics Today lays out a more …

Anti-inflammatory medications such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and steroids are commonly used to treat various diseases. According to a new study, a colored extract obtained from the seeds of the avocado (Persea americana) — an important tropical crop that is rich in unsaturated fatty acids, fiber, vitamins B and …

Future manned trips to Mars will require on-site resources, including water, and planetary scientists from a project called ‘Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) on Mars’ are mapping the availability of potential water-ice sources across the Martian surface. Artist’s concept of humans working on Mars. Image credit: NASA / Johnson Space …

Evidence of an enormous solar storm that struck the Earth around 2,610 years ago has been found in ice cores from Greenland. An artist’s illustration of events on the Sun changing the conditions in near-Earth space. Image credit: NASA. Our Sun sometimes produces highly energetic particles, which are accelerated either …

Using data from the LAMP (Lyman Alpha Mapping Project) instrument aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, planetary researchers have observed water molecules moving around the dayside of the Moon. A view of the Moon’s south pole showing where reflectance and temperature data indicate the possible presence of surface water ice. Image …

After eight months of effort and sending more than a thousand commands in an attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, NASA declared its mission complete on February 13, 2019. The newly-released images are the final photos Opportunity took on the Red Planet as a dust storm darkened …

Bennu — the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft mission — is a B-type asteroid with a 1,614-foot (492 m) diameter. It completes an orbit around the Sun every 436.6 days (1.2 years) and every 6 years comes very close to Earth, within …