Dust ? often thought of as an impediment to lunar exploration ? could be put to good use to build giant telescopes on the Moon ? perhaps some large enough to fill entire craters, says a team of US researchers.
And there are a host of problems that would have to be worked out. The team has yet to determine the type of devices that might be used to spin the mirrors, and the telescopes would need detectors, actuators, steel support structures and other…
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World champion Tyson Gay ran the fastest 100 meters of all-time to win the American Olympic trials on Sunday, a wind-assisted 9.68 seconds. The victory put Gay into his first U.S. Olympic team but the wind speed of 4.1 meters per second deprived the 25-year-old of a world record.
Jamaican Usain Bolt holds the world record of 9.72 seconds. The previous best time under any conditions was a wind-assisted 9.69 seconds by Obadele Thompson of Barbados in 1996.
A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.
Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by…
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The ancient catastrophe that gave birth to the Moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth’s skies for tens of millions of years.
Separate modelling work by Matija Cuk, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, suggests small, asteroid-sized objects a few tens of kilometres across would have lasted the longest as Trojan satellites. Cuk estimates…
A new type of solar sail has been woven by a team of scientists in Finland. The spiderweb-like sail is designed to catch the wind of ionised gas that blows from the Sun, carrying spacecraft to the outer reaches of the solar system, or letting them tack back and forth through the asteroid belt on exploration or mining missions.
A test mission, to see whether the method works, might involve eight ribbons about a kilometre long, towing a small spacecraft carrying an accelerometer. Janhunen then envisages full-scale missions with up to 100 ribbons, each 20 km long,…
How will life on Earth end? The answer, of course, is unknown, but two new studies suggest a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp. -I'm sure the U.N. and Congress are considering proposals to collect taxes to prevent this. Based on same science as global warming?
In one of Batygin and Laughlin's simulations, Mercury was thrown into the Sun 1.3 billion years from now. In another, Mars was flung out of the solar system after 820 million years, then 40 million years later Mercury and Venus collided.
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Stephen Hawking called for a massive investment in establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars in a lecture in honour of NASA’s 50th anniversary. He argued that the world should devote about 10 times as much as NASA’s current budget ? or 0.25 percent of the world’s financial resources ? to space.
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