The inaugural CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) crew is “back on Earth” after leaving their simulated Martian habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on July 6. The first of three simulated missions, CHAPEA Mission 1, was designed to help scientists, engineers and mission planners better understand how living on another world … Read more
Fuzzy new photos of a mountain-sized asteroid, a ‘planet killer’ that recently reached its closest approach to Earth in more than a century have revealed a surprising new feature of the giant space rock: it has a secret mini-moon. Asteroid 2011 UL21 is a possibly dangerousnear-Earth object previously estimated to be anywhere from 1.1 to … Read more
An exoplanet in its star’s habitable Goldilocks zone is now suspected of having a liquid water ocean and an atmosphere. The planet, called LHS 1140 b, is about 1.7 times the size of Earth and is located about 48 light-years away. This distant world, first discovered in 2017, now turns out to be a rocky … Read more
Roberto Molar Candanosa/Johns Hopkins University An illustration shows exoplanet HD 189733b, a gas giant 64 light-years away. Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and more. CNN — A Jupiter-sized exoplanet has long intrigued astronomers for its scorching temperatures, howling winds, and sideways rain … Read more
A hellish planet with a “hot Jupiter” relatively close to Earth would probably smell like rotten eggs if we ever made the trip there, new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals. HD 189733 b is a gas giant located about 64 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. It orbits extremely close to … Read more
A quarry with bands of layered limestone from the ancient seabed in what is now Mercato San Severino, Italy. Credit: Mariano Remírez, George Mason University Approximately 183 million years ago, during the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE), volcanic eruptions in what is now South Africa released approximately 20,500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the … Read more
It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere. But as you enjoy long, balmy days at the beach or out in nature, you may be surprised to learn that our planet is slowly but surely getting closer to the sun, a point known as aphelion. Here’s what you need to know about this celestial event that takes … Read more
For some planets, the meteorite bombardment never stops. A new analysis of data collected by a seismometer on Mars shows that space rocks are hitting the red planet much more often than we ever suspected. In fact, it looks like Mars is taking a real beating. Based on the number of nearby impact-related tremors detected … Read more
Large language models can be made 50 times more energy efficient with alternative mathematics and custom hardware, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz claim. In an article titled “Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling,” authors Rui-Jie Zhu, Yu Zhang, Ethan Sifferman, Tyler Sheaves, Yiqiao Wang, Dustin Richmond, Peng Zhou, and Jason Eshraghian describe how to … Read more
A huge ‘planet killer’ asteroid will make a very close approach to Earth later this week, speeding safely past our planet at a speed of around 93,000 km/h. The ‘potentially hazardous’ mountain-sized object is one of the largest space rocks to pass close to Earth in more than a century – and you can watch … Read more