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A new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope during its alignment process shows galaxies and stars in the background. (Image credit: NASA/STScI) The next great observatory is sharpening its vision and well on the way to cracking mysteries of the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope launched in December, arrived at its station … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope‘s key pointing instrument is working well in testing, according to two space agencies involved with the observatory’s commissioning work. The Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), a contribution from Honeywell on behalf of the Canadian Space Agency, successfully “locked on” to a specific guide star in tracking mode on Sunday (Feb. 13), … Read more
Scientists watching the skies for asteroids that may threaten Earth have hit a new milestone, spotting the 10,000th sizable space rock that circles the sun near Earth’s orbit. The detection comes as part of NASA’s ongoing planetary defense work, which discovers and monitors space rocks in the inner solar system to assure that no large … Read more
Josh Fischman: Hi, and welcome to COVID, Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series. This is your fast-track update on the COVID pandemic. We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I’m Josh … Read more
Nuclear fusion could potentially provide abundant, safe energy without the significant production of greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear waste. But it has remained frustratingly elusive as a practical technology for decades. An important milestone toward that goal has now been passed: a fusion reaction that derives most of its heat from its nuclear reactions themselves … Read more
The secret behind a record-breaking nuclear fusion experiment that spit out 10 quadrillion watts of power in a split second has been revealed: a “self-heating” – or “burning” – plasma of neutron-heavy hydrogen inside the fuel capsule used in the experiment, according to researchers. Last year, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope has fired its thrusters and reached its orbital destination around a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet, NASA said Monday, a key milestone on its mission to study cosmic history. At around 2:00 pm Eastern Time (1900 GMT), the observatory fired its thrusters for 5 minutes … Read more
It’s an exciting time to be an organ transplant physician. Just two weeks ago, doctors in Baltimore reported completing the first successful transfer of a pig heart into a living human patient. Now pig kidneys might be just around the corner. In late September 2021 a team of researchers transplanted a gene-edited pig’s two kidneys … Read more
A major milestone has just been reached in quantum computing. Three separate teams around the world have passed the 99 percent accuracy threshold for silicon-based quantum computing, placing error-free quantum operations within tantalizing grasp. In Australia, a team led by physicist Andrea Morello of the University of New South Wales achieved 99.95 percent accuracy … Read more
What started in 1989 as an e-mail list for a few dozen string theorists has now grown to a collection of more than two million papers—and the central hub for physicists, astronomers, computer scientists, mathematicians and other researchers. On January 3 the preprint server arXiv.org crossed the milestone with a numerical analysis paper entitled “Affine … Read more