Amazon's Jeff Bezos to go to space on Blue Origin rocket
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans on Monday to fly into space next month on a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, fulfilling what he said was a lifelong dream. The 57-year-old billionaire said he and his brother Mark will blast off from Earth on July 20 on the first crewed flight of the company's New Shepard launch vehicle. Blue Origin is auctioning off the third seat in the
NASA's new $23 million space commode system is more than just a toilet
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Going to the bathroom at the International Space Station is about to get easier and cleaner with a new toilet system that cost NASA $23 million to develop. Astronauts are connecting and checking out the toilet, which actually is a high-tech improvement to the space station's water recycling system. The multimillion-dollar budget for the project includes another unit installed ins
China tests new parachute system for rocket boosters
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09China tested a new rocket-booster parachute system during a recent launch from the southwest of the country, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said on Monday. The system was tested on June 3 when the meteorological satellite Fengyun-4B was sent into a geostationary orbit via a Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province.
SpaceX's night-time launch sends SiriusXM satellite into orbit
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a communications satellite for SiriusXM early Sunday from Florida in the first such mission since one of the broadcast company's spacecraft failed after launch in December. The satellite, known as SXM-8, was lifted aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 12:26 a.m. from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch, which occurred at the start of
Axions could be the fossil of the universe researchers have been waiting for
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Finding the hypothetical particle axion could mean finding out for the first time what happened in the Universe a second after the Big Bang, suggests a new study published in Physical Review D on June 7. How far back into the Universe's past can we look today? In the electromagnetic spectrum, observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background - commonly referred to as the CMB - allow us to se
Frozen rotifer reanimated after 24,000 years in the Arctic tundra
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Move over water bears, rotifers are pretty tough too. According to new research, Bdelloid rotifers, a class of microscopic invertebrates, can remain frozen for thousands of years and survive. Recently, researchers at the Soil Cryology Lab - part of the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, located in Russia - reanimated a Bdelloid rotifer that ha
GMRT measures the atomic hydrogen gas mass in galaxies 9 billion years ago
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR) in Pune, and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), in Bangalore, has used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) to measure the atomic hydrogen gas content of galaxies 9 billion years ago, in the young universe. This is the earliest epoch in the universe for which there is a measurement of the atomic hydrog
AI spots coronal holes to automate space weather
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Scientists from the University of Graz (Austria), Skoltech and their colleagues from the US and Germany have developed a new neural network that can reliably detect coronal holes from space-based observations. This application paves the way for more reliable space weather predictions and provides valuable information for the study of the solar activity cycle. The paper was published in the journ
Stream of stars extends thousands of light-years across the Milky Way
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09It's hard to see more than a handful of stars from Princeton University, because the lights from New York City, Princeton and Philadelphia prevent our sky from ever getting pitch black, but stargazers who get into more rural areas can see hundreds of naked-eye stars - and a few smudgy objects, too. The biggest smudge is the Milky Way itself, the billions of stars that make up our spiral ga
The origin of the first structures formed in galaxies like the Milky Way identified
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09An international team of scientists led from the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), with participation from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of
Physicists determine how auroras are created
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09The aurora borealis, or northern lights, that fill the sky in high-latitude regions have fascinated people for thousands of years. But how they're created, while theorized, had not been conclusively proven. In a new study, a team of physicists led by University of Iowa reports definitive evidence that the most brilliant auroras are produced by powerful electromagnetic waves during geomagne
New connector for sustainable structures on Earth and in space
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09During his time at EPFL under the Erasmus program, Romain van Wassenhove came up with an idea for a connector that could be used to make modular structures out of sustainable bamboo rather than wood, plastic or metal. "I wanted to focus my Master's on a topic that had meaning to me and that would lead to a concrete application," he says. "Working with bamboo was something I already had in mind w
Space travel weakens our immune systems
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Microgravity in space perturbs human physiology and is detrimental for astronaut health, a fact first realized during early Apollo missions when astronauts experienced inner ear disturbances, heart arrhythmia, low blood pressure, dehydration, and loss of calcium from their bones after their missions. One of the most striking observations from Apollo missions was that just over half of astr
NASA Map Gives Most Accurate Space-Based View of LA's Carbon Dioxide
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09Using data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3) instrument on the International Space Station, researchers have released one of the most accurate maps ever made from space of the human influence on carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The map shows tiny variations in airborne CO2 from one mile of the giant L.A. Basin to the next. The highest CO2 readings,
Space travel weakens our immune systems: Now scientists may know why
Monday, 07 June 2021 19:07Microgravity in space perturbs human physiology and is detrimental for astronaut health, a fact first realized during early Apollo missions when astronauts experienced inner ear disturbances, heart arrhythmia, low blood pressure, dehydration, and loss of calcium from their bones after their missions.
One of the most striking observations from Apollo missions was that just over half of astronauts became sick with colds or other infections within a week of returning to Earth. Some astronauts have even experienced re-activation of dormant viruses, such as the chickenpox virus. These findings stimulated studies on the effects of weak gravity, or "microgravity," on the immune system, which scientists have been exploring for decades of manned rockets launches, shuttle travel and space station stints, or sometimes by simulating space gravity in earthbound labs.
In the last study led by one of the first women astronauts, Millie Hughes-Fulford, Ph.D., researchers at UCSF and Stanford University now have shown that the weakening of an astronaut's immune system during space travel is likely due in part to abnormal activation of immune cells called T regulator cells (Tregs).
Tregs normally are triggered to ramp down immune responses when infection no longer threatens and are important regulators of immune responses in diseases ranging from cancer to COVID-19.