Science

Video Blue Origin, the orbital delivery service funded by Amazon supremo Jeff Bezos, has taken its first satellite launch booking. We’re told the sat will be put into orbit in 2021 or 2022 – basically, once Bezos has finished building the rocket to do the job. It’s been a busy 48 hours for Bezos, who first surprised his Twitter followers …

A new NUS research finds that taxi cabs painted yellow are 9 percent less likely to be involved in accidents than ones painted blue. The study was led by Professor Ho Teck Hua, NUS Deputy President (Research & Technology) and Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor, in collaboration with Associate Professor Chong Juin Kuan from NUS Business and Assistant Professor Xia …

NASA will send an ice chest sized box to ISS to make a cool place in the universe. The box will have lasers, electromagnetic knife and vacuum chamber to eliminate the energy of gas particles, making them motionless. The instrument is named CAL, Cold Atom Laboratory, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California created this instrument. “Studying these hyper-cold …

A YouTube user spotted a mysterious bright object on a live NASA feed and it has conspiracy theorists buzzing. Footage of a mysterious bright object caught on a NASA feed from the International Space Station (ISS) has excited conspiracy theorists who say the stream has been altered to hide an “alien megaship.” In the video taken from an ISS camera …

A NASA scientist has presented the idea of launching a giant magnetic shield around Mars in order to restore its atmosphere and potentially make the Red Planet habitable in the future. Mars is thought to have been temperate and to have had surface water around 3.5 billion years ago, but 90 percent of its atmosphere has been destroyed by solar …

Nasa released a close-up view of Jupiter that captures the turbulent region just west of the Great Red Spot in the South Equatorial Belt, with resolution better than any previous pictures from Earth or other spacecraft. The photo featured above was taken by Juno on December 11th, 2016. It was enhanced by citizen scientist Sergey Dushkin, as part of the …

With their sweeping hues of blue and red creating a stunning portrait of spiraling curves, the whirling clouds of Jupiter look like a distant cousin of Vincent van Gogh’s famed The Starry Night painting — at least in this new image captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Citizen scientist Amelia Carolina Sparavigna saw the similarities between the real-world snapshot and the …

As the Arctic warms faster than any other place on the planet and sea ice declines, there is only one sure way to save polar bears from extinction, the US government announced: decisive action on climate change. In a final conservation management plan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service singles out climate change-driven sea ice loss as the “primary threat” …

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft in orbit around Mars maneuvered out of the path of Phobos earlier this week after navigators predicted the spacecraft could run into the Martian moon in the near future, highlighting the challenge of tracking an international fleet of Mars probes set to double in size by 2021. The Mars Atmosphere and VolatileEvolutioN (MAVEN)spacecraft has been orbiting Mars …

A new paper from the University of Alberta details a novel theory as to why predatory dinosaurs took up bipedal movement, while their mammal counterparts didn’t. Bipedalism in dinosaurs was inherited from ancient and much smaller proto-dinosaurs. The trick to this evolution is in their tails explains Scott Persons, postdoctoral fellow and lead author on the paper. “The tails of …

Giant telescope captures images of galaxy NGC 1055, sister of the Milky Way. The spiral galaxy is located roughly 55 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cetus (the Sea Monster). A recent image from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope captures NGC 1055 from the side, showing it as a bright, colorful streak of gas, dust …