Science

Ken Mattingly, who orbited the moon and commanded a pair of NASA shuttle missions, but who was remembered as well for the flight he didn’t make — the near-disastrous mission of Apollo 13 — died on Tuesday in Arlington, Va. He was 87.His death was confirmed by Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokeswoman. She did not specify the cause or say whether he died…

Flicking the switch on any kind of electrical device triggers a marching band of charged particles stepping to the beat of the circuit's voltage.But a new discovery in exotic materials known as strange metals has found electricity doesn't always move in step, and can in fact sometimes bleed in a way that has physicists questioning what we know…

The uncrewed Artemis I mission, including the Space Launch System Rocket and Orion spacecraft, is targeting liftoff on August 29 between 8:33 a.m. ET and 10:33 a.m. ET from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Although there is no human crew aboard the mission, it's the first step of the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the…

Enlarge / A Webb composite image of Jupiter from three filters.NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt. NASA has released two more images made from data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope, and they reveal incredible detail about the…

Lucy will explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids – thought to be “fossils of planet formation.” Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight CenterEven before its launch in October 2021, <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="NASAEstablished in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration…

There is much we still don’t know about the inside of our planet – but scientists recently discovered water is slowly leaking down there from the surface.It’s not a simple journey. The liquid is dripping down descending tectonic plates, before eventually reaching the core after a 2,900 kilometre journey.And while the process is slow, it has over…

A huge sunspot on the far side of the sun is set to face Earth this weekend, potentially lashing our planet with a geomagnetic storm. The spot is so big it's changing the way the sun vibrates, according to spaceweather.com. If the dark spot hurls a blob of plasma at Earth, it could disrupt our magnetic field, affecting GPS and communication…

And what hairy beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards a laboratory to be born?Some 3,900 years ago, on mainland Siberia, the last known woolly mammoth breathed its last. Since then, humans have known mammoths only through their remnants: scattered bones and a small number of frozen carcasses, complete with the tatty remnants of…

Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSaveWhen an ocean wave falls, the ground shakes. Now, those wobbles are getting bigger.Stormier seas and larger ocean swell in recent decades are pounding Earth’s seafloor with more force, sending larger ripples through Earth’s crust — almost like a tiny, tiny, tiny earthquake. The biggest…

Astronomers have obtained unprecedented images of a plasma jet from a supermassive black hole in blazar 3C 279, revealing complex patterns that challenge existing theories. This international effort, utilizing advanced radio telescope networks, has discovered helical filaments near the jet’s source, indicating the potential role of magnetic…