Crumbd

After Chandrayaan 2: ISRO's upcoming interplanetary missions to Mars, Venus, the Sun

There a string of interesting projects on the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO's) to-do list in the near-future. The upcoming Chandrayaan 2 mission (in and the Gaganyaan manned mission planned for 2022 are two of the better-known big missions, but far from the only ones for which work is underway. The agency is also working on a total of seven interplanetary missions over the coming decade. Among the destinations are Mars, t........

Noah's Ark, Anyone? Arctic 'Doomsday Vault' Stocks Up On More Food Seeds

An Arctic "doomsday vault" is set Tuesday to receive 60,000 samples of seeds from around the world as the biggest global crop reserve stocks up for a global catastrophe. The seeds are to be deposited in the vault inside a mountain near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen Island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) from the North Pole. "As the pace of climate change and biodiversity loss increases, there is new urgency surrounding efforts to save fo........

‘Mars is alive’: NASA’s InSight lander REVEALS Red Planet is seismically active world

On the surface it looks like a cold, barren wasteland, but a fresh tranche of research based on data collected by NASA’s InSight mission has found that Mars is alive with seismic activity. InSight is a robotic lander tasked with studying the deep interior of the Red Planet. It’s equipped with a range of scientific tools to probe Mars, including a seismometer for detecting quakes, sensors for gauging wind and air pressure, and a heat........

NASA Records 'Hottest Temperature' in Antarctica, Shows Shocking Images of Melting Snow

According to a report published by NASA, on February 6, Argentina’s Esperanza Base, a research station on Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula, recorded a temperature of 18.3°C (64.9°F), which was equal to that of Los Angeles that day. NASA further noted that the second hottest temperature of 17.5 C (63.5 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded five years back in March 2015. While the World Meteorological Department is still verifying the reading's accuracy, NASA released the shocking ........

How the public is helping NASA's Juno mission

From the outside, the agency may appear a monolith, but in reality, citizen scientists can play a substantial role -- perhaps none more so than in the ongoing Juno mission. Since 2016, the Juno spacecraft has circled Jupiter, scanning the atmosphere and mapping its magnetic and gravitational fields. It's also carrying JunoCam, a camera specifically designed to record images of the poles; areas of the gas giant not previously well documented. "We do not have a formal imaging science team on Juno, so we have ........

SpaceX will launch private citizens into orbit

SpaceX is planning to send up to four private citizens into space to take a trip around Earth sometime at the end of 2021 or in early 2022. The spaceflight company announced an agreement on Tuesday with Space Adventures, a space tourism business that has helped seven different private citizens take trips to (and from) the International Space Station aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket and spacecraft. Space Adventures said the price of th........

Not magic, science! Researchers develop system to produce electricity out of thin air

Researchers have achieved the seemingly impossible by producing electricity out of thin air. The remarkable system uses an incredibly thin film of protein nano-wires and a little bit of air, and voila, voltage! Decades ago, scientists discovered an unusual microbe, G. sulfurreducens, which can not only produce magnetite without oxygen, but it can also make bacterial nano-wires that conduct electricity. After years of research and development, the Air-gen was born. The system is quite straightforward and co........

Scientists discover ancient turtle that was as large as a car

The turtle, which is the subject of a new research paper published in Science Advances, was a true goliath. Weighing in at over 2,500 pounds, the beast now known by the scientific name Stupendemys geographicus would have been as large as a mid-sized car. The turtle species was first identified way back in the 1970s, but the fact that they were capable of reaching such incredible sizes is a much more recent development. The new specimens reveal just how impressive these turtles were, and you probably wouldn........

New research suggests stars don't collapse, they explode!!!

By conducting experimental research with matter 10 million times denser and 25 times denser than that found at the centre of the sun, researchers have determined the nature of the nuclear processes that occur within intermediate-mass stars. Our understanding of the deaths of both low and high mass stars are fairly sound, but the team’s findings could change how we think about the fate of stars that lie in between. They........

Archaeologists Have Long Sought, But Never Found The Very First Wheel

Not many of us would decorate a mug with our wheels, let alone take them to the grave. But about 5,000 years ago, Bronze Age people did both, and those acts created some of the oldest surviving evidence for wheeled vehicles. Despite this evidence and decades of archaeological research, we don’t know precisely where the first wheeled vehicles were made. In part, that’s because of the margin of uncertainty around radiocarbon dates. The method produces an age range such as 3100 to 3300 B.C., rather than a precise year like 3273 B.C. Radiocarbon dates........

Is There Gravity in Space?

Astronauts in orbit are more accurately in free fall. They’re constantly falling towards Earth—which means Earth is keeping quite the gravitational hold on them. They just happen to be also moving fast enough that they keep missing the ground. Gravity does weaken with distance. But for massive objects like stars and planets, their gravitational reach is enormous. Without Earth’s gravity, the Moon (which orbits roughly a thousand times farther away........

The sparkling rise of the lab grown diamond

Lab-grown diamonds are also created using extreme pressure and heat, but inside a machine rather than the bowels of the Earth. There are two ways to grow a diamond. Both involve starting with the “seed” (a flat slither) of another diamond. The first lab diamond was made using a High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) system, where the seed is then placed amidst some pure graphite carbon and exposed to temperatures of about 1,500C and pressurised to a........

It's official: Search for ET must be taken seriously

The head of one of the US's national observatories says the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe needs to be taken more seriously. Dr Anthony Beasley told the BBC that there should be greater government support for a field that has been shunned by government research funders for decades. His backing for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti) marks a sea change in attitudes to a field regarded until recently as fringe science.........

One of the brightest star in Milky way to explode soon, leaves experts puzzled

The mysterious dimming of one of the most visible stars in the Orion constellation has astronomers scratching their heads, with some saying Betelgeuse could be about to explode while others point to passing conditions. 'The stunning new images of the star's surface show not only the fading red supergiant but also how its apparent shape is changing,' the ESO said after astronomers used the observatory's very........

Researchers were not right about left brains

In a new paper, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Vienna measured the magnitude and pattern of shape asymmetry of endocasts from humans and apes. "Great ape brains are rarely available for study, but we have developed methods to extract brain asymmetry data from skulls, which are easier to access. This made our study possible in the first place," says lead author Simon Neubauer. The team found that the magnitude of asymmetry was about the same in humans and most great apes. Only chimpanzees were less asymmetric, on aver........

Ghost ancestors? African DNA study detects mysterious human species

Scientists examining the genomes of West Africans have detected signs that a mysterious extinct human species interbred with our own species tens of thousands of years ago in Africa, the latest evidence of humankind's complicated genetic ancestry. The study indicated that present-day West Africans trace a substantial proportion, some 2% to 19%, of their genetic ancestry to an extinct human species - what the researchers called a "ghost population." Homo sapiens first appeared a bit more than ........

NASA Is Looking For New Astronauts to Walk on the Moon and You're Eligible to Apply!

The requirements for a Master's degree in science, engineering or mathematics (STEM) can also be met by being two years into a STEM PhD, or by being a test pilot, one of the most well-worn paths to the astronaut corps. A medical degree or one in osteopathic medicine also works. The candidates will need at least two years' professional experience, or, in the case of pilots, 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time. And, for the first time ever, candidates will........

On board the Antarctic expedition that reveals dramatic penguin decline

The number of chinstrap penguins in some colonies in Western Antarctica has fallen by as much as 77% since they were last surveyed in the 1970s, say scientists studying the impact of climate change on the remote region. The chinstrap penguin, named after the narrow black band under its head, inhabits the islands and shores of the Southern Pacific and Antarctic Oceans and feeds on krill. "Something is happening to the fundamental building block........

Mysterious radio signal from space is repeating every 16 days

Mysterious radio signals from space have been known to repeat, but for the first time, researchers have noticed a pattern in a series of bursts coming from a single source half a billion light-years from Earth. Between September 16, 2018 and October 30, 2019, researchers with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment/Fast Radio Burst Project collaboration detected a pattern in bursts occurring every 16.35 days. Over the course o........

New Tyrannosaurus Species Called the 'Reaper of Death' Found in Canada

Scientists said Monday they had discovered a new species of dinosaur closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex that strode the plain of North America some 80 million years ago. Thanatotheristes degrootorum -- Greek for "Reaper of Death" -- is thought to be the oldest member of the T-Rex family yet discovered in northern North America, and would have grown to around eight metres (26 feet) in length.........