Nature & Science

In 2015, the Obama administration signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA, or H.R. 2262) into law. This bill was intended to “facilitate a pro-growth environment for the developing commercial space industry” by making it legal for American companies and citizens to own and sell resources that they extract from asteroids and off-world…

Picture two tissue box-sized spacecraft orbiting Earth. Then picture them communicating, and using a water-powered thruster to approach each other. If you can do that, then you’re up to speed on one of the activities of NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program (SSTP.) It’s all part of NASA’s effort to develop small spacecraft to serve their…

A ceremony was held Oct. 4 in Gifu Prefecture to mark the completion of the KAGRA gravitational wave detector that scientists hope will play a key role in detecting gravitational waves generated by catastrophic cosmic events, such as the birth of a black hole. The KAGRA in Hida city will be the fourth of its…

It was the sound heard all around Puget Sound. Or, as Mountlake Terrace resident David Carlos named it, “The Quarantine Boom of 2020.” Likely, it was a meteor’s sonic boom that sent vibrations through the region shortly after 7 p.m. May 6, scientists said. Carlos said he was watching television, his cat sleeping soundly beside…

The new global map of asteroid Bennu.Image: NASA/Goddard/University of ArizonaTo prepare for OSIRIS-REx’s pending touchdown onto the surface of Bennu, NASA used the spacecraft to photograph every nook and cranny of the weirdly shaped asteroid. The purpose of this exercise was to catalog potentially hazardous geological features, but a side benefit is that we have…

Biological age is the objective assessment of an individual’s health status. Hypothetically, a ‘normal’ person’s biological age- – as far as appearance, performance, and functional capacity- ought to be equivalent to his chronological age. Until now, many scientists have endeavored to create systems to precisely determine people’s biological age. In a recent study in California,…

Comparison of Modern Human and Neanderthal skulls from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Credit: DrMikeBaxter/Wikipedia In recent years, scientists have uncovered evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals share a tangled past. In the course of human history, these two species of hominins interbred not just once, but at multiple times, the thinking goes. A…

Even in pastels, this depiction of a rauisuchian sends a shiver down the spine.   | Photo Credit: Viktor Radermacher more-in Viktor Radermacher says his job is to give the world an idea of what long-extinct species looked like It measures up to 10 metres from snout to tail, has four stumpy legs and —…

Grapefruit-sized depressions found in rocks on the Isle of Skye have revealed that a type of stegosaurus once wandered the landscape, researchers say. The newly discovered tracks form a single line, a few metres long, with a right-left pattern and two different-sized prints – as would be expected for an animal on all fours –…

The physicist Freeman Dyson, who has died aged 96, became famous within science for mathematical solutions so advanced that they could only be applied to complex problems of atomic theory and popular with the public for ideas so far-fetched they seemed beyond lunacy. As a young postgraduate student, Dyson devised – while taking a Greyhound…