His work was celebrated, but he was ostracized for racist, sexist comments. James Dewey Watson, who helped reveal DNA’s double-helix structure, kicked off the Human Genome Project, and became infamous for his racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive statements, has died. He was 97. His death was confirmed to The…
“The FAA is concerned with the system’s ability to maintain the current volume of operations.” The federal government shutdown, now in its 38th day, prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a temporary emergency order Thursday prohibiting commercial rocket launches from occurring during “peak hours” of air traffic. The…
This technological tradition lasted longer than Homo sapiens have even been a species. At a site in Kenya, archaeologists recently unearthed layer upon layer of stone stools from deposits that span 300,000 years, and include a period of intense environmental upheaval. The oldest tools at the site date back…
Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket gave an environmental monitoring satellite a perfect ride to space. Welcome to Edition 8.18 of the Rocket Report! NASA is getting a heck of a deal from Blue Origin for launching the agency’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Blue Origin is charging NASA about $20 million…
But the differences are likely to be subtle, so it won’t be easy. The Event Horizon Telescope only recently gave us the first images of the environment immediately surrounding a black hole. Since then, it has been boosting the resolution and filling in the details of an environment dominated…
As a test case, the machine was used to test a model of superconductivity. Quantum computers based on ions or atoms have one major advantage: The hardware itself isn’t manufactured, so there’s no device-to-device variability. Every atom is the same and should perform similarly every time. And since the…
Google engineers think they already have all the pieces needed to build a data center in orbit. It was probably always when, not if, Google would add its name to the list of companies intrigued by the potential of orbiting data centers. Google announced Tuesday a new initiative, named…
The three-man crew was supposed to return to Earth on Wednesday to wrap up six months in space. Three Chinese astronauts were due to depart the Tiangong space station, reenter the atmosphere, and land in the remote desert of Inner Mongolia on Wednesday. Instead, officials ordered the crew to…
Meanwhile, the US Global Forecasting System continues to get worse. The Atlantic hurricane season is drawing to a close, and with the tropics quieting down for a winter slumber, the focus of forecasters turns to evaluating what worked and what did not during the preceding season. This year, the…
A dedicated organ grows the fungus, which deters parasitic wasps. Many insect species hear using tympanal organs, membranes roughly resembling our eardrums but located on their legs. Grasshoppers, mantises, and moths all have them, and for decades, we thought that female stinkbugs of the Dinidoridae family have them, too,…
