Science

A new Chinese rocket company has raised more than $100 million

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One of China’s newest launch startups has been raising serious amounts of money for its range of increasingly complex “Gravity” launch vehicles. Orienspace was founded in 2020 and announced itself last year after securing initial funding of $65 million, detailing plans for a series of rockets. The firm has just secured a further $47 million, … Read more

Moon: crashing rocket will create new crater – here’s what we should worry about

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This is a still frame from the short film “A Trip to the Moon.” (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Georges Melies) This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. David Rothery is a professor of planetary geosciences at The Open University. It’s not often that the sudden appearance … Read more

India will launch its first space mission of 2022 tonight. Here’s how to watch live.

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India’s first launch of 2022 will send a new Earth observation satellite to space after a sibling satellite was lost in a failed launch last year. You can watch the launch of the EOS-04 satellite live on Sunday (Feb. 13) at 7:29 p.m. EST (0029 GMT or 6:29 p.m. local time Monday, Feb. 14), assuming … Read more

A Building Block of Life May Have Formed in Cosmic Dust Clouds Before Reaching Earth

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There are few bigger questions than how life first got started on Earth, but trying to put in the detective work almost 4 billion years after the event is understandably hard going for scientists. Now it looks as though we might have found another clue.   New research focuses specifically on peptides, smaller versions of … Read more

Antarctica’s Hidden Under-Ice Rivers Could Play a Significant Role in Sea-Level Rise

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Underneath Antarctica’s vast ice sheets there’s a network of rivers and lakes. This is possible because of the insulating blanket of ice above, the flow of heat from within the Earth, and the small amount of heat generated as the ice deforms.   Water lubricates the base of the ice sheets, allowing the ice to … Read more

People Trust Nonsense More if They Think a Scientist Said It

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Discontinuity is the antithesis of inspiration. The complexity of the present time seems to demand an unveiling of our hopes if we are going to survive. This life is nothing short of a blossoming osmosis of mythic understanding. Sounds like bullshit? That’s because it is.    These statements were generated using the New Age Bullshit … Read more

A New Simulation of Mars’s Core Could Explain How It Lost Its Magnetic Field

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Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It’s also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall to minus 140 C (minus 220 F) at the poles. But it wasn’t always a dry, barren, freezing, inhospitable wasteland. It used to be a warm, wet, almost inviting place, where liquid water flowed across … Read more

We’ve Found The Part of The Brain That Helps Us Say Words How We Intend To

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While it might feel as though we do it without thinking, getting words from our brain and out of our mouths in an intelligible way is actually an incredibly complex process – and scientists just made a new discovery about a key part of it.   Our brains are always adjusting what we’re saying based … Read more

Scientists Think They’ve Unlocked The Secret of Long-Term Lyme Disease Symptoms

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Scientists may have discovered a new way of tackling the lingering, debilitating effects of Lyme disease, the tick-borne illness that can lead to flu-like symptoms and a rash called erythema migrans.   The latest research suggests that dead fragments of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, continue to hang around in the body … Read more

The Olympics Has 100 Percent Fake Snow–Here’s The Science of How It Gets Made

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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The winter Olympics conjure up images of snowy mountain ranges, frozen ice rinks and athletes in cold-weather gear. And for good reason. Winter Olympic venues have often been in places that receive an average snowfall of 300 inches per … Read more