environment
-
NASA’s Voyager 1 Is Finally Making Sense After Months of Transmitting Gibberish
The Voyager 1 spacecraft returned usable data for the first time in more than five months, giving hope for the 46-year-old mission to finally be able to resume its normal operations. NASA’s favorite interstellar probe transmitted data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems to mission control on Saturday, the space agency…
-
NASA Set to Launch Solar Sail for Sunlight-Propelled Space Travel
NASA’s experimental solar sail is ready to take flight in Earth orbit, using the pressure of sunlight to test a new way of propulsion through the cosmos. The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System(ACS3) is scheduled for launch on Tuesday, April 23 on board Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from New Zealand. The mission will use composite…
-
Jawbone in England Appears to Belong to Largest Marine Reptile Ever Known
A jawbone found in Somerset, England, may belong to the largest marine reptile yet known, a huge ichthyosaur that lived about 200 million years ago. The new species is dubbed Ichthyotitan severnensis and may have been over 80 feet long, according to the team’s estimates. The finding means that ichthyosaurs could have grown nearly as…
-
These Birds Politely Gesture ‘After You’ in a Never-Before-Documented Behavior
Tits are polite, at least while mating. Don’t misinterpret what I say: a team of scientists observed the birds fluttering their wings to signal their mating partner to go first when returning to their nests, expanding the number of species known to communicate by gesture. Humans rely on many types of nonverbal communication. There’s the…