Mystery crater: A 40-foot crater has appeared in the ground near Managua airport. Nicaraguan authorities said the hole was caused by a meteorite that broke off from the passing Pitbull, or 2014 RC, asteroid. But NASA officials said that was unlikely, because such a strike would have produced an enormous fireball streaking across the sky, yet nobody reported seeing anything […]
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Mapping the infant universe is no easy task. New data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite is giving astronomers their most complete look yet at the very earliest moments of the universe. Planck, which measures microwave radiation, has created a heat map of the temperatures present in the universe a mere 370,000 years after the Big Bang. The data […]
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Mysterious plumes of gas rising more than 150 miles above the surface of Mars have left scientists confounded. On two occasions in the spring of 2012, amateur astronomers spotted a cloud developing on the surface of the Red Planet. The plumes, which spanned about 600 miles in diameter and changed shape constantly, appeared within a few hours and remained […]
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The Milky Way and its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are on course for “ a head-on collision,” says astronomer Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute. But no need for precautions because the crash won’t happen for another 4 billion years. Researchers have long known that Andromeda, currently some 2.5 million light-years away, is moving toward […]
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New images of a galaxy located 60 million light-years from Earth have revealed that / it’s a cannibal. Composite pictures from the La Silla Observatory in Chile show that the NGC 1316 galaxy is strewn with dust N and small star clusters, space debris that astronomers say is the remains of another galaxy that was swallowed up by the black […]
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If you’re worried about infertility, don’t try to Google the term with a computer on your lap, says the London Telegraph. A new experiment suggests that radiation from a single Wi-Fi-enabled laptop may be strong enough to cause cell damage in sperm. Argentine researchers took samples of ejaculated semen and left them directly under a computer—simulating holding a laptop directly […]
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“Turns out the rumors are true,”. Word has spread through the scientific community that “researchers in China have successfully edited the genomes of human embryos.” Those rumors were confirmed when a team from Sun Yat-sen University published laboratory results revealing that they had crossed an ethical red line, using a gene editing tool on embryos to modify the gene responsible […]
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Babies exposed to air pollution in the womb are more likely to have autism than those whose mothers spend pregnancy in clean air, according to a new study. In the largest study of its kind, UCLA researchers compared levels of air pollutants, mostly related to vehicle traffic, during pregnancy gestation periods of 7,603 children with autism and 75,635 children without […]
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“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein
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New data suggests there may be two undiscovered planets lurking on the outer fringes of our solar system. Astronomers at the Complutense University of Madrid have detected curious abnormalities in the orbits of a belt of icy rocks at the edge of the solar system, far beyond the orbit of Neptune, the eighth and final known planet. (In 2006, Pluto […]
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