Russia refuses to launch UK’s OneWeb satellites unless demands are met

Roscosmos will not launch three dozen OneWeb internet satellites as planned on Friday (March 4) unless the company meets new demands, the Russian space agency announced today (March 2). This morning, Roscosmos rolled a Soyuz rocket out to the launch pad at the Russia-operated Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying 36 satellites for the London-based company … Read more

Can electric fields help plants grow? New claims met with caution

A study suggests that a small device powered by wind and rain can boost crop yield, but other researchers have cast doubt on the findings Life 13 January 2022 By Adam Vaughan Pea plants growing in a greenhouse Andreeshcheva Katerina/Shutterstock A team of researchers claims to have shown that a high-voltage electric field generated using … Read more

Biologist E. O. Wilson Dies at 92. His Legacy Is More Critical Now Than Ever

E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success.   By the time I … Read more