Science

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin on Monday announced it wants to launch a space station that will house up to 10 people in the second half of the decade, as the race to commercialize the cosmos heats up. “Orbital Reef,” described in a press statement as a mixed-use business park in space that will support microgravity

In 1993, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park introduced the world to dinosaurs like never before. While researchers were interested in the reptile that occupied Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, the movie made people curious about it. Since then, technological advancements have let scientists uncover deep-buried facts about dinosaurs. Today, whatever we know about them,

With Winter coming, air pollution in India is going to once again hit crisis levels soon. At the individual level we can wear masks and use air purifiers in our homes, but more broadly, cities and municipalities have also been installing outdoor air purifiers over several years now — but do these actually work? Have

NASA said Friday it is now targeting February 2022 for the uncrewed lunar mission Artemis 1, the first step in America’s plan to return humans to the Moon later this decade. The space agency had initially wanted to launch the test flight by the end of this year, with astronauts on the ground by 2024

In a first, surgeons have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a human and monitored the pinkish organ function normally for more than 50 hours. They hope this breakthrough could address donor organ shortages for life-saving transplants one day. While complex medical procedures similar to this have been done before on primates, it’s the first time

NASA has shared a dramatic image of two peculiar galaxies locked in a cosmic dance. The event was taking place at a distance of about 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus and was captured by the space agency’s powerful Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows the diminutive galaxy almost attached to its

Governments all over the world are looking at energy security as a priority to power their industries, businesses, homes, and offices. But there are finite sources of energy and the technology to harness renewable energy is still decades away from a wider adoption. US-based company Radiant is trying to address this challenge by developing a

A woman had a potentially fatal experience in Canada recently. As she slept through the night a meteorite, a small meteorite pierced through her roof and came crashing on her pillow. It barely missed her head, but created a hole in the roof. The incident turned the light back on the question: What if a

An augmented reality (AR) professional 3D-printed a full-scale Velociraptor for his daughter and went on to bring it to life (virtually). A video shared by Florent Germain on Twitter shows the results of this fun experiment. Germain tweeted on October 20, “Last month, I 3D printed a full-scale Velociraptor for my daughter. Then, I went

Vaping e-cigarettes may not be useful in helping people quit smoking, a recent research suggests. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had earlier suggested that smokers could switch from puffing cigarettes to vaping e-cigarettes if they were unable to quit smoking. This came with one condition: smokers would have to completely switch

Astronomers have observed an accreting white dwarf abruptly lose and gain its brightness for the first time. White dwarfs are stars that have run out of their basic fuel: hydrogen. Usually, researchers have observed white dwarfs losing their brightness over days or months. Astronomers were studying the white dwarf binary system, TW Pictoris, and the

NASA never stops surprising us with stunning images from outer space. In a new Instagram post, the space agency has released a new photo of Milky Way on October 19. The colourful image is a panorama of the Milky Way’s galactic centre. NASA mentions that by “combining observations from across the electromagnetic spectrum,” it has

Russian actress and a film director returned to Earth Sunday after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit. Yulia Peresild, 37, and Klim Shipenko, 38, landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe at 04:36 GMT (10:06am IST), according to footage broadcast live by Russia’s Roscosmos space

While NASA is sending a spacecraft to Jupiter’s asteroids in an unprecedented mission to unravel the mystery of solar system’s origin, a physicist has said that a meteorite, that crash-landed in a home in Canada this month, can offer similar results. Peter G. Brown, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Western

Space has always intrigued humans. While many exploration missions have hitherto focussed on our neighbours like the Moon and Mars, US space agency NASA is taking the game a notch higher with its latest launch. NASA is daring to send one of its spacecraft to a place in the dark alleys of the outer solar

Virgin Galactic said on Thursday it is delaying its commercial space travel service to the fourth quarter of 2022 and will not conduct another planned test flight this year. Virgin Galactic said “commercial service is now expected to commence in Q4 2022.” Shares in the company fell 13 percent in afterhours trading. The US Federal

Maintenance of the International Space Station (ISS) can become hectic for astronauts. So, NASA has devised a way to help astronauts with their chores. Astrobee, a free-flying robotic system assistant, is NASA’s new addition onboard the ISS. The purpose of this robot is to undertake routine tasks so that astronauts have ample time to spare

Mars is quite similar to Earth, as per a NASA scientist. In a video interview, astrobiologoist Dr. Becky McCauley Rench said that the Red Planet wasn’t as dry always, as we see it today. As per NASA’s own website, “Mars, like Earth, has seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and weather.” Signs of ancient floods

A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have come up with a bipedal robot that performs the twin function of walking and flying. The team claims that their latest creation is not just agile but also capable of complex movements. Named Leonardo, the part-walking robot, part-flying drone is built in such

Having made a career out of playing an explorer of the cosmos, William Shatner – Captain James Kirk of Star Trek fame – did it for real on Wednesday, becoming at age 90 the oldest person in space aboard a rocketship flown by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, an experience the actor called profound. Shatner