The rivalry between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has officially reached the Moon. NASA announced on Tuesday that it had selected Bezos’s Blue Origin to carry out the first in a planned series of three uncrewed lunar missions aimed at preparing for a future Moon base, handing the company a contract worth about $230M. The…
PC: X (Representative Image) Nasa has announced an ambitious three-phase roadmap to build a permanent base on the Moon, with the space agency planning three lunar missions later this year as part of preparations for a sustained human presence beyond Earth following a successful lunar flyaround.At a press conference on Tuesday, Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman…
Michael Faraday (Image: Wikipedia) Some quotes feel heavy the moment you read them. Others seem simple at first and then quietly stay in your mind for longer than expected. This line, often attributed to Michael Faraday, belongs to the second category. It does not sound dramatic. It does not use complicated language. Still, there is…
A quiet field can look completely ordinary until you notice the pattern. Many cows and deer seem to rest or graze with their bodies lined up roughly north-south. That odd detail first drew serious scientific attention in 2008, when Sabine Begall, Hynek Burda and colleagues reported that cattle and deer across many locations often followed…
Chien-Shiung Wu (Image: Wikipedia) This quote from Chien-Shiung Wu has been floating around science circles for years, sometimes posted with a bit of humour, sometimes with admiration, and sometimes just as a passing thought people save without really explaining why. On the surface, it sounds light, almost domestic in a way, like someone complaining about…
Marie Curie (Image: Wikipedia) There are certain quotations that survive decades because they speak not only to the moment in which they were said but also to experiences that continue to repeat in human lives. Marie Curie’s words belong to that category. The quote does not sound dramatic at first reading. It does not contain…
The issue of harmful algae blooms is currently becoming one of the major environmental and health risks in the world, impacting lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and even coastal areas on various continents. To tackle this problem, the NASA agency has decided to apply technologies of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and remote sensing to detect harmful algae…
As the Sun sets over the dry plains of rural Texas, something unusual begins to happen inside a series of long metal buildings surrounded by empty land. One by one, giant roofs slowly roll open, exposing hundreds of telescopes pointed toward the night sky. Some belong to hobbyists in Europe. Others are controlled by astrophotographers…
China’s race to build practical humanoid robots has mostly played out behind factory doors so far. Machines have sorted parcels, carried components, and repeated carefully programmed movements in controlled environments. But a different challenge is beginning to emerge, one that appears far messier and far more personal. As reported by the South China Morning Post,…
Researchers at Stanford Medicine have reported a breakthrough in Type 1 diabetes research after successfully curing the disease in mice using a new method designed to “reset” the immune system. The experimental treatment combined stem-cell transplants, insulin-producing pancreatic cell transplants and a much gentler preparation process involving low-dose radiation and immune-targeting drugs. After treatment, the…
Brazil is developing lab-grown donkey collagen to counter a global decline in donkey populations driven by rising demand for China’s traditional anti-ageing medicine, ejiao. Through the effort, scientists are aiming to deliver a scalable alternative by 2027 that could reduce slaughter and stabilise the species.At the centre of this effort is Carla Molento, a veterinarian…
For decades, a vast region south of India has quietly refused to make sense. Satellites mapping Earth’s shape kept returning the same unsettling result: the ocean surface there sits noticeably lower than it should, as if something invisible is pulling it down from below. Ships passing through would never notice anything unusual, yet space-based measurements…
Inside factories, data centres and power plants, heat is usually treated as a problem rather than a resource. It drifts away in plumes, warms the surrounding air, and disappears into the atmosphere with little thought given to its potential. Yet some engineers are now circling back to that wasted energy and asking a slightly unusual…
A major chemical emergency in Garden Grove, Orange County, has forced around 40,000 residents to leave their homes after a storage tank at the GKN Aerospace facility began overheating and releasing hazardous vapours. The chemical inside the tank is methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a volatile industrial liquid used in plastics and resin manufacturing. Officials warned…
Brian Cox (Image: Wikipedia) Something is interesting about human beings that appears very early in life. Children ask endless questions before they know anything about science, philosophy or technology. They ask where stars go during the day. They ask why the sky changes colours in the evening. They ask why birds fly, why oceans seem…
Imagine an ocean so enormous it stretched across half the planet, wider than the Atlantic, older than the Himalayas, home to creatures we’ve only read about in history books. It was called the Tethys Ocean, and for hundreds of millions of years, it sat between the ancient landmasses that would eventually become Europe, Africa, and…
Gold has fascinated civilisations for millennia because of one remarkable quality: it rarely loses its shine. Ancient coins, jewellery and royal artefacts buried for thousands of years can still emerge gleaming with their familiar golden glow. Scientists have long known that gold resists corrosion better than most metals, but the exact atomic mechanisms behind this…
Deep beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean, roughly a thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador, the seafloor has been keeping time. Every five to six years, in almost the same locations, at almost the same intensity, a magnitude 6 earthquake strikes with a regularity so precise that scientists reached for the word “clockwork” to describe…
The link between artificial light at night, street lights, light pollution, biodiversity destruction, nocturnal fauna, bats, insects, and birds is becoming more evident in modern environmental science. It has been suggested that too much light during the night not only causes comfort for humans but also becomes a serious threat to the environment. Research concerning…
For 25 years, the ISS was the only address humans kept beyond Earth. It is closing. What replaces it is not one station; it is an orbital economy, built by private companies and designed to manufacture things that cannot be made on the ground.In November 2000, two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut moved into…
