Spacedaily

During the Solar System’s first million years, its earliest outer worlds formed from material that was up to 92 percent heat-forged rock, while gas flowing through the young system filtered out much of the surrounding ice-rich dust. - Space Daily

Two chemical tracers in carbonaceous iron meteorites indicate that the earliest outer Solar System planetesimals contained only 8 to 17 percent fine matrix, extending aerodynamic sorting to the opening era of planet formation.

NASA budgeted 200 kilograms of fuel for Roman’s first course correction, but the telescope used only 18. Combined with extra fuel loaded before launch and further expected savings, that could stretch its 10-year fuel plan to at least 22 years. - Space Daily

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope began its journey to the Sun-Earth L2 region with a propellant budget built around uncertainty. The first major test of that reserve has produced a result far…

Ancient rocks from Western Australia suggest Earth was already dragging surface water into its mantle and using it to generate volcanoes 3.1 billion years ago — through a primitive recycling process that may have preceded modern plate tectonics - Space Daily

Earth's plumbing system may have begun working billions of years before we thought, with ancient volcanic rocks hinting that the planet was already recycling water deep underground during an era we assumed was geologically simpler.

On Deimos, orbital speed just above the surface is only about 14 km/h—around elite racewalking pace—while roughly 20 km/h would let you escape the tiny moon altogether. - Space Daily

On Earth, orbit belongs to the realm of rockets. The International Space Station travels at roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour, and a projectile would need about 40,000 kilometres per hour near Earth…

Reef fish on a Curaçao coral patch never bolted from a black disk expanding on an iPad below two metres a second, and that threshold sits just under the speeds at which bar jacks on the same reef were filmed attacking - Space Daily

Looming is the word for what an approaching object does to an eye. The image of the thing grows, and it grows at an accelerating rate, and that rate carries information: how fast the object is coming…

A routine quality check on a Moon map turned up a bright spot ringed by a dark halo, and it marked a 222-metre crater that did not exist before spring 2024, the largest newly formed crater yet found anywhere in the solar system - spacedaily.com

Robert Wagner was checking image quality on a global map of the Moon when the halo appeared. The crater it marks, now named McGetchin, is 222 metres across and 43 metres deep, and a zone of ground seven kilometres across now runs 8 to 9 kelvin colder at night…

Citizen scientists revived NASA’s long-retired ISEE-3 probe in 2014 and fired its thrusters for the first time in 27 years, restoring its spin—but the larger burn meant to return it to an Earth–Sun observation point failed because the nitrogen needed to pressurize it - Space Daily

In 2014, a spacecraft launched before the first Space Shuttle flight was approaching Earth for the first time in decades. NASA had ended support for ISEE-3 in 1997. The specialised ground equipment o…

Methone, a moon of Saturn only about three kilometres across, has no observed craters larger than 130 metres: its porous icy surface may slowly shift and erase impact scars, while Saturn’s tides and the moon’s rotation mould it into a smooth, egg-like shape. - Space Daily

Saturn’s satellite system ranges from Titan, larger than Mercury, to bodies so small that a brisk cyclist could cross them in minutes. Methone belongs near the lower end. It measures only about three…

Nature reported that a magnetic storm held the 10:05 p.m. express at Exeter for 16 minutes in 1841, years before the line opened in 1846; researchers now read 1841 as a misprint for 1848 - Space Daily

Since its rediscovery in 2013, the report has stood as a candidate for the first time space weather interfered with a piece of human technology. A study published on 16 September finds that the line from Exeter to Starcross did not open until 30 May 1846, and…

On the dwarf planet Ceres, a lone mountain called Ahuna Mons rises four kilometres from an otherwise flat, cratered plain, built not from lava but from erupting salty brine that froze solid. - Space Daily

Ceres is a world of subdued relief. Its charcoal-grey surface is crowded with impact scars, but between the craters much of the terrain rolls gently across the dwarf planet. Then one mountain breaks …

The Moon’s freshest craters are recognisable by bright rays of newly excavated rock and dust, which space weathering gradually darkens—and the new 222-metre McGetchin crater is so fresh that its ejecta still gleams, having formed sometime between 11 Ap - Space Daily

The bright mark that stopped image specialist Robert Wagner during a routine data check was not the crater itself. It was debris thrown across the Moon when an asteroid or comet fragment struck the s…

Two identical satellites fly 220 kilometers apart above the Earth, firing a laser between them precisely enough to notice a change in distance smaller than the width of a red blood cell, and that flicker is how scientists now weigh the water moving beneath entire - Space Daily

Here’s the conclusion first, because it’s the part that still doesn’t feel like it should be possible: nobody photographs the water disappearing from an aquifer in California or the ice thinning unde…

A Cold War hydrophone network built to track Soviet submarines across entire ocean basins was declassified in 1991, and scientists now use those same undersea microphones to follow individual whales calling to each other across thousands of miles of ope - Space Daily

Christopher Clark, the marine mammal scientist who ended up running the civilian side of this network, has said it plainly: “I could show you the evidence today. I can listen in Puerto Rico to a whal…

In 1949, researchers testing underwater acoustics off Bermuda lowered an early recording system into the water and kept the unexplained sounds it picked up. Seventy-seven years later they were identified as what may be the oldest preserved recording of a - Space Daily

A mysterious sound recorded in 1949 remained unidentified for 77 years—until scientists realized they'd captured the oldest known whale song, decades before anyone understood these creatures sang at all.

A pond in Ethiopia's Danakil Depression has a measured salinity of 433 grams per kilogram — roughly twelve times saltier than the open ocean and saltier than the Dead Sea — sitting inside one of the hottest, most hostile landscapes on the planet - Space Daily

Near the base of the Dallol hydrothermal field in Ethiopia’s Afar region sits a pond barely 60 meters long, its water tinted pale yellow by dissolved iron. Chemists who sampled it found a total disso…

Hubble found a narrow ribbon of stars apparently stripped from a globular cluster in a galaxy 115 million light-years away—the first evidence of such a stream beyond the Milky Way, opening a new way to map dark matter in distant galaxies. - Space Daily

A narrow ribbon beside an ultra-diffuse galaxy has become the strongest evidence yet for a globular cluster stellar stream beyond the Milky Way. The feature appears in deep Hubble images of UGC 9050-…

Astronomers had only 116 observations of the jet erupting from blazar 3C 345 across 27 years. An AI system turned them into the highest-resolution continuous reconstruction yet—and revealed features appearing to travel 10–13 times faster than light. - Space Daily

Astronomers did not film the jet of 3C 345 continuously for 27 years. They observed it 116 times between 1995 and 2022, then used a neural representation to infer one changing radio image consistent …

A mammoth-ivory hunter pulled a wolf's head from the Siberian permafrost with its fur, whiskers and brain still intact — the animal had been dead for roughly 40,000 years - Space Daily

The permafrost's deepest freezer just gave up one of its most pristine secrets—a wolf so perfectly preserved that scientists can study its brain, tissue and final moments from an Ice Age that ended long before humans domesticated its descendants.

Planet Nine isn’t hiding because it would be small — if it exists, it may be several times Earth’s mass and more than twice as wide. But hundreds of times farther from the Sun than Earth, it receives hundreds of thousands of times less sunlight, and the tiny fracti - Space Daily

Planet Nine, if it exists, would not be a pebble overlooked in the dark. The current hypothesis describes a world several times Earth’s mass, probably built more like a cold sub-Neptune than a rocky …

A 1.5-acre cemetery in upstate New York holds a bee population comparable in number to more than 200 honeybee hives, because roughly 5.5 million solitary mining bees nest beneath its lawns — each female digging her own burrow, with no hive and no qu - Space Daily

Rachel Fordyce used to save on parking. A technician in a Cornell University entomology lab in Ithaca, New York, she left her car at a plaza and cut across East Lawn Cemetery to work and one spring m…

A park visitor at Carowinds spotted a crack in a steel support column on the Fury 325 roller coaster before the ride's inspectors caught it. The ride stayed shut for more than a month while engineers checked the rest of the structure. - Space Daily

Phones were out, most of them pointed up at the trains cresting the first hill. One of those phones caught something a maintenance walk-through had not: a steel column near the base of the ride, crac…

In 2018, JTC and NParks sank eight reef structures on bare sand off Small Sister's Island; by February 2022 the two left unplanted carried 95 coral colonies from seven genera - Space Daily

Eight structures went down on bare sand in 2018. Four years later, the two that nobody planted anything on were carrying 95 coral colonies from seven hard-coral genera across their designated survey …

Thirty-nine of the 47 registered Beefalo whose genomes were sequenced carry no detectable bison ancestry, including the foundation bull that sold for $2.5 million in 1975 and whose pedigree recorded him as more than a third bison - Space Daily

The American Beefalo Association defines the breed as three-eighths bison. A genome-wide survey of frozen semen, drawn largely from animals collected at or near the founding of the breed, found that not one Beefalo in the data set meets the standard, and foun…

About 176,000 years ago, Neanderthals built enormous rings from broken stone formations 336 meters inside a French cave — more than two tonnes of material arranged in total darkness for a purpose archaeologists still cannot explain - Space Daily

Two and a bit tonnes of snapped rock, stacked into neat circles, in a chamber that has never once seen daylight. Nobody has worked out why. Bruniquel Cave sits above the Aveyron gorges in the Tarn-…

Bacteria at a plant in Grangemouth eat the leftovers of Scotland's whisky industry — almost 750,000 tons of spent barley and two billion liters of pot ale a year — and excrete acetone, ethanol and butanol, with the butanol close enough to gasoline to burn in an - Space Daily

Every liter of Scotch whisky leaves a mess behind it. For each liter of the spirit, a distillery produces roughly two and a half kilograms of spent barley grains called draff and about eight liters o…

The universe's first stars probably ignited 100–250 million years after the Big Bang and died within a few million years. Their ancient light can still reach Earth, but individual stars are so distant and rare that none has been conclusively identified—althoug - Space Daily

The universe had to make stars before it could make almost everything familiar. Carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron were not present in meaningful quantities after the Big Bang. They had to be forged in…

Developers planned a city of 30,000 people in the hills directly across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, with 50 apartment towers, hundreds of homes, a shopping mall and a luxury hotel — the project collapsed in court, and its planned main boulevard is n - spacedaily.com

Two Spanish-tiled stucco gateposts once stood at the mouth of Tennessee Valley in Marin County, opening onto nothing at all. Behind them a road climbed into the hills and stopped. It had been bulldo…

From 1974 to 1990 Kumamoto Prefecture sealed about 1.5 million cubic metres of Minamata Bay sediment above 25 ppm mercury under a 58-hectare landfill that cost 48 billion yen - Space Daily

Stand on the eastern shore of Minamata Bay today and part of the ground underfoot is manufactured: 58 hectares of reclaimed land, capped with mountain soil, holding down sediment that was too poisono…

In 1903, a mining engineer staked a claim on Arizona's Meteor Crater, convinced a fortune in iron lay beneath the floor, and spent 26 years drilling for a meteorite that had mostly vaporized on impact — his family still owns the crater today, and science later pro - spacedaily.com

The hole in the ground east of Flagstaff is nearly a mile across and deep enough to swallow a 50-story building, and in 1903 the United States government’s official position was that it was a volcano…

In 1970, Oregon highway crews packed half a ton of dynamite under a dead whale on a Florence beach, expecting the blast to send the pieces out to sea — falling blubber crushed a car a quarter mile away, and in 2020 the town officially named the site Explo - Space Daily

The problem, in fairness to everyone involved, was genuinely hard. In November 1970, a sperm whale 45 feet long and weighing about eight tons washed up dead on the beach near Florence, on the central…

Andromeda is visible from 2.5 million light-years because the light of hundreds of billions of stars blends together. But an Earth-like planet there would be roughly ten billion times fainter than its own star and separated from it by only about 1.3 microarcseconds - Space Daily

Andromeda can be found without a telescope under a sufficiently dark sky, even though its light has travelled about 2.5 million years. That sounds like an argument for astronomical eyesight. It is re…

A 67-year-old told her eleven children she was "going for a hike", then hiked the Appalachian Trail alone in canvas sneakers, sleeping under a shower curtain with a 17-pound sack over one shoulder. She reached Katahdin on September 25, 1955, 146 days o - spacedaily.com

Most people who set out to walk more than two thousand miles of mountain footpath carry a tent, a sleeping bag, a compass, and a map at the very least. Emma Gatewood carried none of those things. Sh…

An Iowa man built his six-inch parakeet a miniature submarine so the bird could join him underwater in the Bahamas — the homemade capsule used a paintball air tank, safety valves and an oxygen monitor and carried Bebe about three feet beneath the surfa - spacedaily.com

Six inches of green parakeet hovering over a Bahamian reef, squinting at coral through the wall of a repurposed food container, is an image evolution had not budgeted for. Bebe, a white-winged parak…

A box turtle in Louisiana lost both back legs, so veterinarians built it a tiny wheelchair from LEGO car wheels, syringe cases and epoxy — within minutes Pedro was reversing, turning and moving around on his own again - Space Daily

When a beloved box turtle lost his mobility, a veterinary team improvised with spare parts and rapid engineering—proving that sometimes the best solutions come from creative constraint, not cutting-edge technology.

A steel tension tie holding up a 1973 bridge that carries Interstate 40 over the Mississippi was found split most of the way through, and traffic in both directions was stopped within hours on May 11, 2021. Ultrasonic testing of the other welds turned up 12 more w - spacedaily.com

On May 11, 2021, an inspector checking the Hernando de Soto Bridge from above the deck spotted something no routine inspection expects to find. One of the two main steel tension ties in the eastbound…

The torch of the Statue of Liberty has been closed to the public since 1916, when German saboteurs blew up a munitions depot nearby and shrapnel tore into the statue's arm — in the 110 years since, no visitor has been allowed back up the ladder - Space Daily

Every year, millions of people visit the Statue of Liberty, and a lucky, pre-booked fraction climb the 162 steps into her crown. What nobody gets to do what nobody has done as a member of the public …

The Moon is airless, radiation-drenched and can swing from about minus 173 to plus 127 degrees Celsius, yet NASA-led modelling found that some common Earth fungi and bacteria—from human skin, soil and damp bathrooms—could survive dormant for we - Space Daily

The Moon appears to offer Earth microbes nowhere to hide. It has almost no atmosphere, no stable liquid water on its surface and no shield against ultraviolet light or energetic radiation. NASAs stan…

Modern humans interbred with Neanderthals before they disappeared, and most people of non-African ancestry still carry roughly 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA today — meaning part of the human population we once thought we simply replaced never actu - Space Daily

A man who died in a Romanian cave about 40,000 years ago carried more Neanderthal DNA than any other human ever sequenced, ancient or modern. His jawbone turned up in Petera cu Oase, and when genetic…

Astronomers used 69 fast radio bursts as cosmic backlights to complete the clearest census yet of the universe’s missing ordinary matter, finding that roughly 76% resides as extremely diffuse ionized gas in the vast spaces between galaxies — while only 9% re - Space Daily

The universe’s “missing matter” was never thought to have vanished. Cosmologists could infer how much ordinary, atom-building matter should exist, but direct inventories of stars, cold gas and the ho…

A 14-year-old in New York folded 54 variations of the same origami crease pattern and stacked dumbbells on them to see which collapsed — the winning fold held more than 9,000 times its own weight, the design is aimed at flat-pack disaster shelters, and it to - Space Daily

The apparatus for one of the year’s most celebrated student experiments was paper and gym equipment. Miles Wu, 14, of New York City, spent his project folding the same origami pattern over and over …