shaped

Mars: China’s Zhurong rover finds hints landscape was shaped by water

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The first reported findings from China’s Mars rover suggest the plain it is exploring was shaped by winds – and perhaps also by water Space 7 March 2022 By Chen Ly China’s first Mars rover Zhurong with the landing platform Xinhua / Alamy China’s Zhurong Mars rover landed at Utopia Planitia – a large plain … Read more

How Measuring Time Shaped History

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Humans have tracked time in one way or another in every civilization we have records of, writes physicist Chad Orzel. In his new book A Brief History of Timekeeping (BenBella Books, 2022), Orzel chronicles Neolithic efforts to predict solstices and other astronomical events, the latest atomic clocks that keep time to ever more precise decimals … Read more

Famous astronomers: How these scientists shaped astronomy

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Throughout human history, astronomers have helped people understand what they see in the night sky. These famous astronomers — many of them great scientists who mastered many fields — explained space phenomena with varying degrees of accuracy.  Over the centuries, a geocentric view of the universe — with Earth at the center of everything — … Read more

Weird ‘hot Jupiter’ exoplanet is shaped like a football

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A distant exoplanet looks more like a football than the usual sphere, researchers report in a groundbreaking new study. The strange shape of ultrahot WASP-103b, which is more than 1,000 light-years from Earth, is due to the planet being stretched by the gravitational forces of its parent star, according to the new research. WASP-103b was … Read more

New dinosaur: Armoured herbivore had a tail shaped like a fern frond

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Stegouros elengassen, unearthed in Chile, had a strange flattened tail that looked like a fern frond – a feature never seen before in an ankylosaur dinosaur Life 1 December 2021 By Chen Ly An artist’s impression of Stegouros elengassen Lucas Jaymez A new species of ankylosaur found in Chile had a unique tail unseen in … Read more

How changing levels of iron shaped the evolution of life on Earth — and why alien hunters should take note

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Hal Drakesmith, Professor of Iron Biology, University of Oxford Jon Wade, Associate Professor of Planetary Materials, University of Oxford Our red blood is full of iron. We need iron for growth and for immunity. It is even added … Read more