Science

SpaceX successfully launched and landed its reusable rocket! This achievement was the first time we’ve ever managed to launch, land, refurbish, and re-use a rocket for a second launch. SpaceX is calling the rocket, a Falcon 9, “flight-proven” as opposed to “secondhand,” “used” or “reused.” The entire launch and landing …

Neanderthals’ cognitive abilities are a hotly debated topic, but a bird bone fragment found at a Middle Paleolithic site in Crimea, Ukraine, features two notches that may have been made by our extinct cousins intentionally to display a visually consistent pattern, according to a new study. The raven bone fragment …

About 80 million years ago (Cretaceous period), a group of bees began exhibiting social behavior. Today, their descendants — honey bees, stingless bees, and bumble bees — carry ‘stowaways’ from their ancient ancestors. The stingless bee Trigonisca ameliae in Colombian copal. Image credit: Dr David Penney / University of Manchester. …

Looking ahead to the “spiritual, social, and psychological needs” of lunar colonists, Jorge Mañes Rubio, the ESA’s artist in residence, wants to build a temple near the south pole of the moon. Rubio’s vision for a temple entails building a dome on the rim of the 21-km-wide Shackleton Crater. Such an …

Scientists in Argentina have discovered a frog that glows in moonlight and at twilight. Fluorescence in terrestrial environments had previously only been traced to a few species of insects and birds and had never been scientifically reported in any of the world’s 7,000-plus amphibian species. Fluorescence in the polka-dot tree …

An international team of scientists from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden has used a genetic scoring technique to predict reading performance throughout school years from DNA alone. Calculating an individual’s GPS requires information from a genome-wide association study that finds specific genetic variants linked to particular traits. …

NASA has spent decades pushing the bounds of human innovation and exploration, and it’s documented every second of it in excruciating detail. Finding all those images and videos used to be a pain, but no more. NASA has announced a new searchable version of its public Image and Video Library. You …

A team of researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, has discovered a new mechanism involved in the generation of paired photons. In this illustration, one photon (purple) carries a million times the energy of another (yellow). Image credit: NASA / Sonoma State University / Aurore Simonnet. The …

Low-density organic granules that cover the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan are ‘electrically charged,’ according to new experiments done by scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. An artist’s rendering of the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Image credit: Benjamin de Bivort, debivort.org / CC BY-SA 3.0. The research, …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft successfully completed its fifth flyby of the gas giant Jupiter on March 27, 2017. Part of Jupiter’s ‘string of pearls.’ Juno captured this image with its JunoCam instrument on March 27, 2017. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS. At the time of closest approach, …