Astronomers have used the ALMA, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to observe an extremely distant galaxy that looks surprisingly like our Milky Way. The researchers say that the galaxy is very young, and the light from the galaxy has taken over 12 billion years to reach us. Scientists view the galaxy as it was when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old.
NASA has announced that its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has completed another rehearsal before it's landing on the surface of Bennu. When the spacecraft lands on the surface of the asteroid this fall, it will collect samples to return to Earth for study. On August 11, OSIRIS-REx successfully performed its second rehearsal reaching an altitude of 131 feet over the sample site, called Nightingale, before executing a back-away burn.
NASA has spent years investigating Mars up close and personal with its various rovers and spacecraft, the latter of which includes the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This spacecraft orbits Mars, using onboard cameras to snap images of the Red Planet below. This has resulted in a huge number of images, some of which are so strikingly beautiful that they look like art. NASA is showing off some of the best of these images and anyone can download them.
Earthquakes are frequent events that happen around the Earth as fault lines break. Sometimes it can lead to catastrophes such as collapsed buildings or tsunamis. Because of the potential for human death, earthquakes are dangerous and are highly studied phenomena. An international 000 of researchers have recorded what they call a "boomerang" earthquake along the Romanch fracture zone in the Atlantic Ocean.
Red bricks are a very common building material that can be seen all around the world. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have taken red bricks, which are the world's cheapest and most familiar building material, and figured out how to convert them into energy storage units. Essentially, the scientists have turned the common brick into a battery.
The massive Arecibo Observatory, one of the largest single-dish radio telescopes in the world, has suffered considerable damage due to a cable incident, officials report. This isn't the first time the radio telescope has been damaged -- it has been repaired multiple times in the past -- but this latest incident is fairly substantial, leaving a 100-ft wound that took the telescope offline.
Just over two years after it first started hunting for new exoplanets, NASA's TESS has completed its primary mission - now, it's on to the next. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite only began snapping images of the galaxy back in August 2018, and now NASA has a huge database of high-resolution imaging of distant stars.
Researchers have revealed this week that they've been successful in gene-editing a squid for the first time in human history. Cephalopods are used to study Alzheimer's and Parkinson's due to their significantly large brains. Using the DNA editing tool CRISPR, a genetically altered squid will potentially jump-start major advances in the study of neurodegenterative diseases of many sorts.
Over the last decade, NASA scientists have been shooting laser beams at a reflector on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the Moon that's about the size of a paperback novel. That small target is very difficult to hit at a distance of 240,000 miles from Earth. Scientists have now announced that they have been able to receive a signal back for the first time.
The NASA Dawn spacecraft orbited very close to the dwarf planet Ceres located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn's mission ended in October 2018, and near mission completion, the orbiter was circling Ceres at an altitude of less than 22 miles above the surface. The close orbits gave scientists extremely clear images.
SpaceX is building 120 of its Starlink satellites each month, paving the way for a significant expansion in its wireless internet service, but also potentially causing more concern over those worried about the impact on astronomy. Starlink will use a mesh of low-orbit satellites to deliver internet access to users equipped with an auto-tracking dish that can be mounted on a home or RV. However it has not met with universal approval.
This week a research paper published in PLOS Genetics revealed a newly developed algorithm for analyzing genomes. Researchers used their new system on the genomes of two Neanderthals, two humans of African descent, and a Denisovan. Approximately 1% of the genome of the Denisovan came from an "unsequenced, but highly diverged, archaic hominin ancestor."