Boeing's Starliner capsule was preparing to dock with the International Space Station Friday, in a high-stakes uncrewed test flight key to reviving the US aerospace giant's reputation after a series of failures.

The spaceship blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday evening, and is now set to rendezvous with the ISS at 7:10 pm Eastern Time (2310 GMT), as part of a mission to prove it is capable of providing safe rides for NASA astronauts.

An insightful cross-disciplinary team of University of Hawai'i (UH) at Mānoa researchers, working for over a decade, published a study recently revealing that a key number of hours of darkness during the lunar cycle triggers mature "Hawaiian box jellyfish" (Alatina alata) to swim to leeward O'ahu shores to spawn.

Led by Angel Yanagihara, associate research professor at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and the John A. Burns School of Medicine, researchers at the UH at Mānoa have been carefully tracking local box jellies for over 20 years. While the monthly shoreline aggregations are understood to occur like clockwork 8-10 days after each full moon, with jelly forecasts included on the local news, mysteries have remained: Why are they appearing at this particular part of the lunar cycle? Where do these box jellies come from and where are they found the rest of the lunar cycle? Why has this become a monthly problem in only the last 30 years?