Donaldjohanson is a relatively large main belt asteroid, orbiting the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, which was selected for Lucy’s 2nd encounter with an asteroid. On Nov. 1, 2023, Lucy flew fly and took some amazing pictures of Asteroid Dinkinesh and its small companion Selam. www.nasa.gov/... Lucy’s encounters with these two main belt asteroids are intended to test its instruments and tracking systems, in preparation for its main mission of surveying 7 Jupiter Trojan asteroids in 2027-2033. We wrote a full diary on the subject at “Lucy...

Shares of Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. SPCE rallied 3.64% to $2.56 Tuesday, on what proved to be an all-around favorable trading session for the stock market, with the NASDAQ Composite Index COMP rising 2.71% to 16,300.42 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA rising 2.66% to 39,186.98.

Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. closed 90.92% below its 52-week high of $28.20, which the company reached on May 14th.

My interview this week with Cornell climate scientist Doug MacMartin was, perhaps, the most important story no one is talking about. Most people don’t know that multiple climate scientists have recently been saying that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the ocean “conveyor belt” that transports heat from the tropics to Northern Europe, is at risk of collapsing in as soon as 20~30 years. Besides plunging Scandinavia into a deep freeze, it lowers rainfall across the entire northern hemisphere, keeps warm waters near Antarctica which could lead the “several meters”...

Sahelanthropus may be the earliest human ancestor that we know about, but it is mired in controversy. In the 1980s, French paleontologist Michel Brunet and his partner David Pilbeam were searching for hominin fossils in Cameroon, in deposits formed along an ancient shoreline when Lake Chad had been much larger than at present and was surrounded by a mix of tropical forest and open grassland. Then in the 1990s, they received permission from the government of Chad to take an expedition into some remote northern areas of that country, and...

NASA’s trusty Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the so-called red planet for years, just unearthed something huge — a stash of carbon-rich carbonate minerals indicating that the spinning object of Elon Musk’s affection may have once had the goods to host human life. “It tells us that the planet was habitable and that the models for habitability are correct,” said Ben Tutolo, lead study author and associate professor at the University of Calgary, in a matter-of-fact statement. Carbonate minerals typically form when carbon dioxide reacts with water and rock...

Over the past 13 years, the four-wheeled Curiosity rover has traveled approximately 21 miles (34 kilometers) across the Martian surface to gather clues about the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet. A recent discovery by the metallic explorer could provide an answer to the longstanding question of what happened to Mars’ atmosphere billions of years ago, and how the planet may have transformed from a wet, life-friendly world to a dry and arid desert. The Curiosity rover recently uncovered large deposits of carbon within sulfate-rich layers of Mount...

Five people have experienced what scientists say is a brand-new color dubbed “olo,” thanks to an experiment that involved firing laser pulses into their eyes. The method allowed them to see a vibrant hue they described as a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation,” according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances last week. “It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated,” says study co-author Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the participants who saw olo, to Ian Sample at the Guardian. “We...

Some people will tell you that the dire wolves are back, while others will tell you they are not. Colossal Biosciences kicked off an avalanche of media coverage, including both hype and harsh criticism, when the company said it brought back dire wolves, an extinct species given renewed popularity by its role in the Game of Thrones franchise, using gene-editing and cloning technology. We will discuss the details of what Colossal has accomplished, but this technology also raises a bigger question with wider-reaching implications: What does de-extinction mean for the...