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Whatever the mirror test tells us, beluga whales pass it
In hours of underwater video footage from a New York aquarium, a beluga whale named Natasha stretches her neck, pirouettes, nods, and shakes her head in front of a two-way mirror. Her daughter Maris does much the same. According to a new study published in PLOS One, both animals show the behavioral hallmarks of mirror
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SpaceX’s Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight
SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results. The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall
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Soaring solar and a surge in hydro push more coal off the US grid
Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge in coal, interrupting what had been a long downward trend. But over the course of the year, both trends slowed
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Ground system issue scrubs first launch of SpaceX’s Starship V3 rocket
SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day. Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas,
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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft returns unfamiliar views of a familiar world
“As a bonus, it captured Mars images from a rare perspective,” NASA said in a press release. The spacecraft approached Mars from a high phase angle, or from the side opposite the Sun, making the planet appear as a thin crescent as Psyche moved in for the encounter. The wispiness of the thin Martian atmosphere
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“I’ll buy 10 of those”—NASA science chief yearns for mass-produced satellites
But what about spacecraft flying on more well-trodden paths to the Moon, Mars, Venus, or the asteroid belt? “What can we do with these commercial off-the-shelf buses? I would love to walk in and say, ‘I’ll buy 10 of those,’” Fox said. NASA is looking at “block buys” for the next series of commercial missions
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Australian Aboriginals cared for a dingo’s grave for decades
A thousand years ago, the ancestors of today’s Barkindji people carefully buried a dingo (or garli, in the Barkindji language) in a mound of shells. Archaeologists recently studied the burial in what’s now New South Wales, Australia. They found that the Barkindji ancestors had buried the dingo with the same care and ceremony as any
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A revolutionary cancer treatment could transform autoimmune disease
Causing a secondary cancer may be an acceptable risk when treating a life-threatening cancer, but probably not for autoimmunity, says Matt Lunning, medical director for gene and cellular therapy at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha. How to balance the risk between the impacts of an autoimmune disease, which can range widely in severity, and the difficult-to-quantify
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Three's a party: US, China, and now Russia are on the prowl in GEO
The world’s leading space powers desperately want to know what the others are up to high above the equator. For more than a decade, the US military has operated a fleet of “inspector” satellites designed to sidle up to other spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit and take pictures. China started launching its satellites for a similar
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Solar power production undercut by coal pollution
Regional differences The researchers note that aerosols can also contribute to cloud formation, which also causes further losses. But the degree of that contribution is much harder to estimate, so the researchers focus on aerosols for much of the analysis. Some of those aerosols occur naturally, typically from dust kicked up by winds in desert
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