In an astonishing feat of endurance, explorers Justin Packshaw and Jamie Facer Childs are a quarter of the way through a 3600-km kitesurf trek that takes them across the desolate heart of Antarctica. They are not pushing their physical and mental limits to the brink, facing howling gales and temperatures of –55°C just for the sake of adventure. They are gathering information to help scientists better understand how the body responds to extremes and taking unique measurements of their ice environment that will help complement ESA’s CryoSat mission to better understand how this giant ice

Image: Lunar robot wars

Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 15, 2021
Just off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, thousands of gallons of oil seep through cracks in the seafloor and rise to the surface each day. But this isn't a disaster zone: It's one of the largest naturally occurring oil seeps in the world and is believed to have been active for thousands of years. The reliability of these seeps makes the area an important natural laboratory for scie

Washington DC (UPI) Dec 15, 2021
Three years after it was launched, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has become the first spacecraft in history to "touch" the sun, officials said. NASA said the probe flew through the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona, and took some particle samples. The agency called it a "monumental" moment and a "giant leap for solar science." Because it's closer to the sun than any man-made craft h

Hanover NH (SPX) Dec 15, 2021
Nearly a century after Italian physicist Ettore Majorana laid the groundwork for the discovery that electrons could be divided into halves, researchers predict that split photons may also exist, according to a study from Dartmouth and SUNY Polytechnic Institute researchers. The finding that the building blocks of light can exist in a previously-unimaginable split form advances the fundamen

Kourou (AFP) Dec 15, 2021
The launch of the James Webb space telescope scheduled for December 22 won't take place before December 24, NASA announced on Wednesday. The NASA project, launched in 1989, was originally expected to deploy in the early 2000s. But multiple problems forced delays and a tripling of the telescope's original budget with a final price tag of nearly 10 billion dollars (8.8 billion euros).

Duesseldorf, Germany (SPX) Dec 15, 2021
How did the first chemical reactions get started at the origin of life and what was their source of energy? Researchers at the Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf (HHU) have reconstructed the metabolism of the last universal common ancestor, LUCA. They found that almost all chemical steps used by primordial life to piece together the molecular building blocks of cells are energy releasing react

Bonn, Germany (SPX) Dec 15, 2021
An international team of researchers from ten countries led by Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has conducted a 16-year long experiment to challenge Einstein's theory of general relativity with some of the most rigorous tests yet. Their study of a unique pair of extreme stars, so called pulsars, involved seven radio telescopes across the globe an

Liverpool UK (SPX) Dec 15, 2021
A new University of Liverpool study has found that the minerology of the rocks that a meteorite hits, rather than the size of the impact, determines how deadly an impact it will have. The earth has been bombarded by meteorites throughout its long history. Meteorite impacts generate atmospheric dust and cover the Earth's surface with debris and have long been considered as a trigger of mass

Washington DC (UPI) Dec 15, 2021
NASA has regained its radio link with the Mars helicopter Ingenuity and plans its 18th flight on the Red Planet as early as Wednesday, the agency announced. NASA had lost radio contact - except for very brief transmissions - after Ingenuity's Flight 17 on Dec. 5. Hills between the helicopter and the Perseverance rover blocked the link. But the Mars helicopter's team said in a p