“These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.” Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to…
Rice University chemists replicated Thomas Edison’s seminal experiment and found a surprising byproduct. Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super…
Another partially reusable Chinese rocket, the Long March 12B, is nearing its first test flight. Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its…
Their presence appears to lower the risk of food-borne illnesses from pathogens. Every spring, raptors return to nesting sites across northern Michigan. The smallest of these birds of prey, a falcon called the American kestrel (Falco sparverius), flies through the region’s many cherry orchards and spends its days hunting…
The world’s oldest art has an unintentional story to tell about human exploration. The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago. On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island…
The Swarm Garden: An array of modular robot agents that adapt to changing conditions for living architecture. Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that “bloom” like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published in the…
Real estate website scrubbed data under pressure from California real estate brokers. Even as exposure to floods, fire, and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the nation’s leading real estate website. Zillow removed the feature displaying climate…
Study is first to implant micro-electrode arrays to record neurons as they produce facial gestures. Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to communicate. “When my young…
After a remarkably smooth launch campaign, Artemis II reached its last stop before the Moon. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its…
Veronika uses sticks to scratch herself, suggesting scientists have underestimated cow cognition Far Side fans might recall a classic 1982 cartoon called “Cow Tools,” featuring a cow standing next to a jumble of strange objects—the joke being that cows don’t use tools. That’s why a pet Swiss brown cow…
