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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Watch it go! NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission is on its way to the launch pad. NASA’s iconic crawler-transporter 2 (CT-2, or “the crawler”) vehicle is on its way to Pad 39B here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC), carrying the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion spacecraft that … Read more
NONFICTION Life, Linked A reverse journey through geologic time shows the interconnectedness of Earth’s species Otherlands: Journeys in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems by Thomas Halliday Random House, 2022 ($28.99) As a teenager, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, but I had little aptitude for what came before them. I couldn’t make sense of what John McPhee, in … Read more
Petrov’s Flu is an ode to Russian sci-fi and absurdist art Sergey Ponomarev/Sovereign Films Petrov’s Flu Kirill Serebrennikov In UK cinemas now PETROV (Semyon Serzin) is riding a trolleybus home across the snowbound city of Yekaterinburg when a fellow passenger mutters that the rich deserve to be shot. Seconds later, the bus stops, Petrov is pulled onto the … Read more
Humpback whales can swim as far as 3,700 miles (5,955 kilometers) for the chance to mate, per a new study. Scientists analyzed a database of over 450,000 pictures of whales in the wild to track the animals. They found that some would swim thousands of miles during the mating season. Two distinctive males, which could be … Read more
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has reached its deep-space destination, but it’ll be a while yet before the $10 billion observatory starts its science work. On Monday (Jan. 24), Webb slipped into orbit around the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable spot in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. The … Read more
NASA can breathe a $10 billion sigh of relief. The agency’s James Webb Space Telescope arrived safely at its ultimate destination Monday (Jan. 24), in great health and carrying even more fuel than expected after several deep-space engine burns. Webb’s arrival at the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), roughly one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from … Read more
By Gege Li An artist’s impression of how Earth’s first multicellular animals looked on the sea floor Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library Book Otherlands: A world in the making Thomas Halliday OUR planet has existed for some 4.5 billion years In that time, it has undergone extraordinary changes, with landscapes and life forms that would seem … Read more
By Francesca Steele Jessica searches every corner of Colombia for the source of the noise Neon Film Memoria Apichatpong Weerasethakul “IN THIS town, there are a lot of people who have hallucinations,” a doctor tells Jessica (Tilda Swinton) at the beginning of Memoria. Then, in a neat encapsulation of the mix of the mystical and … Read more
This short movie of the James Webb Space Telescope moving through space was captured by astrophysicist Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project on Dec. 29, 2021. (Image credit: Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope Project) Thanks to images from a robotic Earth telescope, you can now watch NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope travel through the final frontier. … Read more
Editor’s Note: This story was published in September. Since then, the launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed again. It is now scheduled to lift off no earlier than December 24. Earlier this month NASA announced that on December 18, after years of delays, the James Webb Space Telescope will finally leave Earth on a … Read more