News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Actor Pete Davidson will reach the final frontier next week, if all goes according to plan. The “Saturday Night Live” star and five other people are scheduled to fly to suborbital space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle on March 23, company representatives announced today (March 14). Liftoff is targeted for 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 … Read more
Having never evolved wings, many species of spider instead evolved an uncanny ability to take to the skies using nothing more than a few short threads of gossamer dangling from their dainty butts. Just how this invertebrate answer to paragliding works has never been entirely clear, though historically biologists have assumed it probably has … Read more
You can send your name on a trip around the moon with just a few clicks of your keyboard. NASA is inviting people to put their names on a flash drive that will launch on the agency’s Artemis 1 mission, which will send an uncrewed Orion capsule around the moon and back a few months … Read more
A stunning drone video from SpaceX shows the company taking apart the fully stacked Starship it plans to launch into orbit later this year. The waterside view on Twitter, posted Saturday (Feb. 19), shows the giant Starship rocket on a crane next to the Super Heavy booster that will attempt the company’s first orbital flight. … Read more
This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Emily Schwing. Have you ever looked up to see a hawk soar overhead, or a small chickadee flit by and wondered: How do they do that? Believe it or not, scientists never really knew either—until now. Talia Lowi-Merri: I looked at the relationship between form and function in … Read more
SpaceX appears to be targeting Wednesday (Feb. 2) to fly its next batch of Starlink satellites, setting up what could be a coast-to-coast launch doubleheader for the private spaceflight company. According to a forecast from the U.S. Space Force’s Delta 45 weather squadron, SpaceX’s next Starlink mission (called Starlink 4-7) is now expected to launch … Read more
You can watch live as a humongous asteroid flies safely past our planet today (Jan. 18). Italy’s Virtual Telescope Project, which is based in Rome, will host a livestream starting at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT), when asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) is almost at its closest approach to our planet: 1 million miles or 1.6 … Read more
In a slow-moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from Earth. This is about five times the distance … Read more
China’s Shenzhou 13 astronauts conducted a manual rendezvous and docking test over the weekend to test emergency procedures for spacecraft visiting the Chinese space station. The complex test involved the Tianzhou 2 cargo spacecraft undocking from the Tianhe core module of China’s Tiangong space station. The astronauts aboard Tianhe then teleoperated Tianzhou 2, guiding it … Read more
Amazon’s Alexa has a new feature: it can fly you to the moon. The virtual assistant, which is more commonly used (on Earth) to control devices around your home, is set to launch on a journey around the moon aboard NASA’s Artemis 1 mission later this year. Together with Cisco’s Webex video conferencing platform, Alexa … Read more