NASA’s Curiosity rover is providing critical insights into what Mars may have been like long ago, and one of its latest discoveries helps support the idea that the Red Planet was one very blue. Scientists believe that Mars was once a fairly wet place and, just like here on Earth, we can find evidence of …
As far as we know, there’s no life that currently exists on Mars. Missions to the Red Planet have yielded tantalizing clues that life may have existed at some point in the past, but no living organisms have ever been spotted by any rover or other hardware humans have sent to Mars. But Mars is …
Mars as we know it today is a mostly dry, dusty place with a few pockets of ice in remote regions. It’s barren and we’re pretty sure it’s lifeless today, but that might not have always been the case. Scientists think that Mars was once a relatively wet world, but if that’s true then where …
NASA’s TESS exoplanet hunting telescope has been on the job for less than a year, but it’s already racking up some impressive discoveries. Following the announcement of a new “Hot Saturn” back in March, NASA just revealed that TESS found its first Earth-sized planet outside of our solar system. TESS — which stands for Transiting …
Finding planets outside of our solar system is a challenge, and determining the size, composition, and surface conditions of such planets is more difficult still. Figuring out whether life could exist on an exoplanet, based on all the previous information? Well that’s about as difficult a challenge as an astronomer can imagine, but researchers from …
Imaging the possibility of life one existing on the surface of Mars got a whole lot easier once scientists realized the planet was once covered in water, but exactly what mechanics impacted the water on ancient Mars is still largely a mystery. A new research effort using data from ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft is shedding …
NASA has learned a lot about Mars thanks to the efforts of its high-tech rovers. We’ve learned a lot about the composition of the planet’s surface, and thanks to Mars orbiters which can relay high-resolution images we know that a large portion of Mars was once covered in water. But we still don’t know if …
If you go back far enough in the fossil record — past the cavemen, dinosaurs, and even the earliest creatures to crawl out of Earth’s oceans to new homes on land — you notice that organisms get simpler and simpler. Life on Earth started with single-cell organism, but eventually evolved into something more complex. Now, …
Much of the focus for NASA and many other space organizations around the world has been on Mars for a while now. Sending a crewed mission to Mars, even if it just orbits the planet and then flies back home, will be an amazing accomplishment for whatever group is the first to make it happen, …
Everyone knows that obesity is a major health crisis in the United States and many other countries, but humans aren’t just getting fatter, we’re also getting bigger overall. Humans are getting larger and larger, and the average person is now significantly taller than the averages of decades past. On top of that, we eat more, …
