Imagine casting your line into the ocean and pulling out a living dinosaur. When a group of fishermen off the coast of Madagascar pulled in their net way back in 1938 they came as close to that kind of discovery as anyone on Earth will ever experience. The crew hauled up a coelacanth, and until …
There are many mysterious things in space that we can’t study in great detail because they’re simply too far away. As technology advances, we’ll have the opportunity to do more intensive research of far-off objects, but as we sit here on Earth, a truly bizarre phenomenon has routinely made the trip right to our front …
Tardigrades — those microscopic organisms that have been found to withstand extreme radiation, the vacuum of space, and temperatures that would turn most other organisms into literal popsicles — are a true wonder of nature. They seem to be virtually indestructible, and in a highly-anticipated 2019 mission by Israel, they were sent to the Moon. …
NASA has been studying Mars for a long time now. Scientists working with the various rovers that have been sent to the Martian surface have uncovered plenty of interesting things, but evidence supporting the theory that there was once life on the Red Planet is still elusive. Finding organic molecules could go a long way …
NASA has been planning on sending humans back to the Moon for a long time now. The space agency’s plans changed when the Trump administration demanded that NASA astronauts return to the surface of the Moon by 2024. That deadline was, and still is, largely unrealistic, especially in light of the delays posed by the …
Your back hurts, you have a headache, or you stubbed your pinky toe on the coffee table and it just won’t stop throbbing. What do you do? Reaching for a common painkiller might be your first instinct, but new research from multiple groups suggests that if you care about your long-term health, you may want …
Climate change is already devastating certain animal populations, both on the land and in the oceans, and it’s only going to get worse as time goes on if we can’t get our thirst for fossil fuels and other pollutants under control. It’s easy to measure the effects on some types of life, like coral reefs …
It was only yesterday that Chinese officials made it sound like we’d be waiting at least a couple more weeks to see the first photos from China’s new Mars rover. News out of the country suggested that while the rover landed safely, it had to go through all of its diagnostic tests before its handlers …
It’s been a few days now since China announced that it had successfully landed its first Mars rover. The robot and its lander had been orbiting the planet since February in preparation for the landing, and now that it’s on the ground, China’s scientists have roughly three months with which to work with the rover, …
You probably don’t think about stars all that often. Sure, the world revolves around one of them but other than the Sun we don’t really have a nice close-up view of any others. As far as stars go, the Sun is pretty great, and it’s the reason life on this planet is able to exist …
