Source: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spent an unexpected Fourth of July aboard the International Space Station, but it was hardly a patriotic display of technical prowess. The two NASA astronauts arrived at the space station on June 6 for what was supposed to be an eight-day mission. But their return … Read more
by Brian PD Hannon In this image taken from NASA video, Kelly Haston, a crew member of the first CHAPEA mission, speaks before other members, from left, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and Anca Selariu, Saturday, July 6, 2024, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The crew of a NASA mission to Mars emerged … Read more
Credit: CC0 Public Domain The melting of one of North America’s largest ice fields has accelerated and could soon reach an irreversible tipping point. That’s the conclusion of new research colleagues and I who have published on the Juneau Ice Field, which straddles the Alaska-Canada border near Alaska’s capital, Juneau. In the summer of 2022, … Read more
Model selection between the original BMS symmetries (dashed lines) and the extended BMS symmetries (solid lines) with Einstein Telescope (ET) and Cosmic Explorer (CE). Evidence for the simulated symmetry group (log Bayes factor) is shown against observation time. Credit: Physical assessment letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.241401 As predicted by general relativity, the passage of gravitational waves … Read more
To find out how migratory birds find their way, sparrows were translocated from autumn stopovers along the Dutch North Sea coast to Switzerland (red, 1948–1957) and Spain (blue, 1959–1962). Source: Biology Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2024.0217 Young, naive starlings search for their wintering areas independently of experienced conspecifics. Starlings are very social birds all year round, … Read more
Orbital configuration of Mars Express (red) and trace gas orbiter (blue) during a typical mutual radio occultation observation, with a black and white arrow indicating the direction of radio communication between the two spacecraft. Credit: Radio science (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2023RS007873 Using the repurposed equipment, a team including researchers from Imperial College London measured parts of … Read more
Map of the line emission from hydrogen (in red and blue) and oxygen (in green) in the PJ308-21 system, shown after masking the light from the central quasar (“QSO”). The different colors of the quasar’s host galaxy and companion galaxies in this map reveal the physical properties of the gas within it. Credit: Decarli/INAF/A&A 2024 … Read more
A team of physicists have created what they claim is the most difficult maze ever created, using a chess pattern to create its structure. To the untrained eye, the maze looks like the most complicated snowflake. But for the puzzle enthusiasts among us, it probably looks like a challenge. The maze is constructed from a … Read more
A group of whales off the east coast of Australia. Photo: Jake Linsky. Research led by the University of Queensland has found that migrating humpback whales off the east coast of Australia became less stressed in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research paper was published in Research into the marine environment. Dr … Read more
A small image of a galaxy that has been distorted into a faint ring by gravitational lensing. At the top of the ring are three very bright spots with diffraction spikes coming off them, right next to each other: these are copies of a single quasar in the borrowed galaxy, duplicated by the gravitational lens. … Read more