With air filters and weekly wipe-downs and vacuuming, NASA goes to great lengths to keep the International Space Station clean so that astronauts stay healthy. But astronauts still often experience health problems like immune dysfunction, skin rashes and other inflammatory conditions. One reason may be because the ISS might be too clean, a new study…
Science fiction, from The Jetsons to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is replete with humanoid robots. But for a long time in the real world, such robots have been a novelty at best and a punchline at worst. Somehow, though, in the last few years, things have shifted. More than a handful of companies are developing…
The moon enters its new phase for February 2025 tonight, leaving the skies nice and dark for observing the many bright planets currently visible in the night sky. The new moon occurs Feb. 27, at 7:45 p.m. EST (0045 GMT Feb. 28), in New York, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. Tomorrow (Feb. 28), the…
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 is perhaps most famous for entombing the Roman city of Pompeii. But in nearby Herculaneum, also buried in the eruption, the preserved skeleton of a young man lying in bed contained a surprising find: glass remnants of his brain. When researchers studied the shiny samples, they saw…
A man who died in the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago seems to have found a unique way to shuffle off this mortal coil. A new analysis of his remains reveals that a lump of dark-colored glass rattling around in his skull was once his brain, vitrified in an extremely rare set…
If a cup of water spills on the floor, the water can’t unspill—that is, it’s inconceivable that each water molecule would exactly reverse its course to slip back into the cup. To do so would be to turn back time—something that, as far as we know, can’t be done. The water either spills or it…
An artist’s impression of an environment where prehistoric plants thrived Christian Jegou/Science Photo Library When the Earth Was GreenRiley Black (St Martin’s Press (US, available now; UK, later this month)) The behaviour of plants is invisible to the naked human eye. They operate on timescales our imaginations can’t entertain, and they run roughshod over familiar categories…
To have a view on aliens and whether or not they exist, you have to believe in outer space in general and other planets beyond our own. So, what does this mean for ancient civilizations? How did they view outer space, the stars, and the objects that we today would refer to as unidentified aerial…
Katy Perry is going to space. The award-winning “E.T.” and “Firework” singer will fly on a firework of her own when she joins the first all-female crew to launch on a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket later this year. The mission, which lifts off this spring, is led by Lauren Sánchez – partner of Blue…
Historically, married women in the United States have done the lion’s share of their households’ laundry, cooking and cleaning. But that gendered norm appears to be shifting, with the gap between the time married women and men spent on such chores shrinking by 40 percent over the last two decades, researchers report February 6 in…