NASA declares Starliner mishap a “high visibility close call”
Enlarge / A protective tent is placed over Starliner after it returned to Earth in December.NASA/Bill Ingalls After pondering the totality of issues that arose during a December test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft this week, NASA chief of human spaceflight Doug Loverro said Friday that he decided to escalate the incident. So he designated…
Mass grave reveals how Black Death impacted rural England
Willmott et al. 2020 Archaeologists recently excavated a mass burial of at least 48 men, women, and children on the grounds of a medieval monastery in Lincolnshire, UK. One person’s teeth contained traces of bubonic plague DNA, and radiocarbon dating suggests that these people were victims of a 14th century outbreak. It’s the first time…
Scientists say supermassive black hole once belched a crater into a...
We’ve seen what happens when stars go supernova and suns explode but scientists believe the biggest explosion in the history of our known universe was the result of a black hole with indigestion. A team of researchers working out of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC recently conducted a detailed study of one our…
Rocket Report: Psyched up for Falcon Heavy, another SLS launch delay
Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Welcome to Edition 2.35 of the Rocket Report! There's lots to get to this week, especially in the realm of heavy-lift rockets. I also want to let readers know that there will be no report next week due to range maintenance, errr, a…
Scientists say this exoplanet could have the right conditions for life
It Lends an Air of Mystery… In the autumn of 2019, as two teams of researchers each reported finding water vapor in the atmosphere of K2–12b. However, details of this alien atmosphere remained unknown, and conditions underneath this hydrogen-rich blanket were a mystery. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England developed simulations of K2–18b,…
Eureka? Scientists think they discovered the particle responsible for dark matter
A research team lead by nuclear physicists Mikhail Bashkanov and Daniel Watts from the University of York recently published research indicating that a newly discovered particle may be responsible for the existence of dark matter. Scientists estimate that some 80% of the universe is comprised of mysterious dark matter, but that’s about as far as…
New bendable concrete could help buildings survive earthquakes
Bendable displays may be all the rage these days, but there’s another material that could benefit from some added flexibility: concrete. Researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology have been developing a bendable, cement-free concrete that could hold up far better to earthquakes, and has a far lower carbon footprint than previous attempts at a…
Data shows who was reading “fake news” before 2016 US election
Partisan misinformation online is at least in part a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. There’s the supply on one side, coming in part from politically motivated websites indistinguishable from propaganda but also from some who are just trying to make a buck bringing in clicks with fake headlines. But there’s also the demand to consider—those…
How do you keep an AI’s behavior from becoming predictable?
Enlarge / The Facebook app displayed on the screen of an iPhone. A lot of neural networks are black boxes. We know they can successfully categorize things—images with cats, X-rays with cancer, and so on—but for many of them, we can't understand what they use to reach that conclusion. But that doesn't mean that people…
Coronavirus: You may need to take a 2-week break from your...
Enlarge / SEATTLE, WA - FEBRUARY 29: Healthcare workers transport a patient on a stretcher into an ambulance at Life Care Center of Kirkland on February 29, 2020, in Kirkland, Washington. Dozens of staff and residents at Life Care Center of Kirkland are reportedly exhibiting coronavirus-like symptoms. As ramped-up testing for COVID-19 by individual US…
