Science

The Rosetta orbiter, as part of a mission to conduct the most extensive research on any comet ever, has captured a stunning – both visually and scientifically – picture of a comet in line with the sun. The Philae comet lander may be dead, but its valiant mothership lives on. Rosetta recently ventured away from the comet to study its …

Astronomers Say That Lasers Can Hide Our Earth From Deadly Aliens. A simple laser beam could disrupt aliens’ observations of Earth, making it look like there’s nobody home on the third rock from the sun, a new study suggests. Professor David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York, has said the relatively simple concept could make the world …

Scientists have, for the first time, mapped a nearby “super-Earth” exoplanet to find that one hemisphere is almost completely molten rock, while the other half is almost completely solid. The super-Earth — which is a classification used for any planet with a mass 1 to 10 times greater than that of our home planet — is named 55 Cancri e …

A team of archaeologists say they’ve made a potentially “seismic” discovery in Canada that could “rewrite the history of Vikings in the New World” — and they did it with the help of medieval sagas and the latest satellite technology. Images of what appear to be man-made objects deep in the ground taken by satellite indicate a Viking settlement in …

Scientists have captured the best ever image of a planet in its early stages of formation – and they say it could be a world similar to our own. The baby ‘Earth 2.0’ was seen in an image of a dense clump of dust orbiting around a young star. The stunning image shows the 10 million year-old star TW Hydra …

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is struggling to understand exactly what went wrong with its brand-new astronomy satellite, Hitomi, which suffered some sort of malfunction over the weekend and is apparently tumbling in space, according to a video captured by an amateur astronomer. The X-ray telescope, dubbed Hitomi after its successful launch on February 27, was due to have …

Bees visit flowers to collect nectar and pollen, which they use as food for themselves and the larvae in their hives or nests. By moving from flower to flower, they are vital pollinators of many garden and wild flowers. Insect pollination is essential for the cropping of most fruits and some vegetables. Some 35 per cent of our diet depends …

The Pavlof volcano in Alaska erupted abruptly on Sunday, right before 4:00 p.m. local time. This was unexpected at the time and the volcano was on the lowest alert status since January 15th last year. This marks the first eruption since November 2014, and there are plenty of pictures to show it in all its glory. Although this sort of …

An astronomer has spotted a “strange light” near Jupiter while filming a time-lapse of the planets. Experts have suggested it could be an asteroid or a comet. John McKeon, an amateur astronomer, saw a “strange light…on the edge of the planetary disc” while he was filming in Ireland. In a description of the time-lapse, John says “the original purpose of …

A newly discovered fossilized skull of a so-called “Siberian unicorn” has revealed that it has survived over 300,000 more years than what the scientists originally thought. A new study published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences discusses the incredible find of a fossilized skull in Kazakhstan. Paleontologists have previously deduced from other finds that these guys were about 15 …

SkyWatch is bringing the NASA International Space Apps Challenge to the Waterloo from April 22­-24. The hackathon attracts Waterloo’s tech talent, who work non­stop for 48 hours to address NASA-­designed challenges. Waterloo joins 170 other cities hosting their own Space Apps Challenges that weekend, for an estimated total of 15,000 global participants.