News
Researchers froze the simplest amino acid to nearly minus 260°C and bombarded it with radiation that mimics cosmic rays — and it formed peptides, the building blocks of proteins, under conditions that exist before stars and planets are born
14+ min ago (116+ words) The experiment sounds almost designed to fail. Take glycine, the simplest amino acid used by life on Earth. Cool it to nearly minus 260°C, colder than almost...
A queen honeybee can live for several years, while worker bees may live for only six weeks in summer — and biologists still cannot fully explain the difference, because queens and workers share the same basic genome and are separated mainly by what they were fed as larvae
1+ hour, 14+ min ago (532+ words) A queen honeybee can live for one or two years on average, and occasionally several years. A worker bee born in the same colony may survive for only a few...
Astronauts insist space has a smell — a mix of seared steak, hot metal and welding fumes that clings to a suit after every spacewalk
2+ hour, 15+ min ago (596+ words) The strangest thing about the smell of space is that no one can smell space directly. Vacuum does not carry scent molecules to a human nose, and an astronaut...
New Horizons flew past Pluto so quickly that an encounter nine years in the making was effectively over within hours — but the data gathered during that brief passage took another 15 months to trickle home
4+ hour, 14+ min ago (771+ words) The New Horizons encounter with Pluto was one of the strangest bargains in modern exploration. NASA spent almost a decade sending a small spacecraft across...
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, returning a hero — but Soviet authorities had also prepared a statement in case he did not survive
5+ hour, 15+ min ago (314+ words) On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space. His Vostok 1 spacecraft carried him around Earth once before he...
Voyager's signal now reaches Earth as a whisper measured in fractions of a billionth of a watt, fainter than almost anything our antennas were built to hear
6+ hour, 14+ min ago (720+ words) Voyager is not loud anymore. It never really was. The spacecraft carries a transmitter with roughly the power of a household light bulb, and that signal has...
Astronomers have found a super-Earth just 25 light-years away — close enough by cosmic standards that it sits in the small category of worlds scientists consider genuinely worth searching for signs of life
8+ hour, 29+ min ago (356+ words) Imagine standing on a shoreline where the sea is calm, the light is the deep red of a dying ember, and the sky feels close enough to touch. Then picture that...
Spaceflight pushes fluid toward the head, flattening the back of the eye and blurring some astronauts' vision in ways that don't always fully recover
9+ hour, 14+ min ago (613+ words) For a long time, the most visible changes to astronauts in orbit were the obvious ones. Faces looked puffy. Legs looked thinner. Astronauts floated, lost bone...
Earth’s inner core is an iron-rich ball as hot as the surface of the Sun, kept solid only because the crushing pressure of the entire planet raises the temperature at which iron can melt
11+ hour, 14+ min ago (686+ words) Earth's centre sounds like a contradiction. The inner core is hot enough to sit in the same temperature range as the visible surface of the Sun, yet it is not...
The most common type of planet discovered in the Milky Way may be a world that does not exist in our solar system — larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and wrapped in an atmosphere we barely understand
11+ hour, 20+ min ago (118+ words) The Solar System gives us a familiar catalogue of planets: small rocky worlds close to the Sun, then gas and ice giants farther out. For a long time, that...