Astronomy

The textbooks say our ancestors lost the ability to make vitamin C because we didn't need it, but the loss may have protected us from some parasites

The textbooks say our ancestors lost the ability to make vitamin C because we didn't need it, but the loss may have protected us from some parasites

The annual Perseid meteor shower will peak overnight Tuesday (Aug. 12), and you can enjoy the event live online with the Virtual Telescope Project's webcast.

Alien: Earth's two-episode premiere is released today and you can watch it anywhere with our exclusive 79% off NordVPN deal, but you'll have to hurry.

Typically, individuals work less effectively in bigger teams, but weaver ants buck this trend by increasing their power output when they pull together

Typically, individuals work less effectively in bigger teams, but weaver ants buck this trend by increasing their power output when they pull together

The web is awash with bots that scrape data without permission. Now content creators are poisoning the well of artificial intelligence – but similar technology can also be used to spread misinformation

The web is awash with bots that scrape data without permission. Now content creators are poisoning the well of artificial intelligence – but similar technology can also be used to spread misinformation

Europe's Ariane 6 heavy-lift rocket launched for the third time ever tonight (Aug. 12), sending an advanced weather and climate satellite to orbit.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a portion of the Tarantula Nebula.

Find out how this simple algorithm from the 1960s catches your typos

Experiments involving AI chatbots interacting on a simulated social media platform suggest efforts to design out antagonistic user behaviour will not succeed

Experiments involving AI chatbots interacting on a simulated social media platform suggest efforts to design out antagonistic user behaviour will not succeed

A conceptual mission known as "Persephone" could explore Pluto and its moons for 50 years  — if it ever gets funded and approved.

The resources tucked away in asteroids promise to provide the building blocks of humanity’s expansion into space. However, accessing those resources can prove tricky. There’s the engineering challenge of landing a spacecraft on one of the low-gravity targets and essentially dismantling it while still remaining attached to it. But there’s also a challenge in finding ones that make economic sense to do that to, both in terms of the amount of material they contain as well as the ease of getting to them from Earth. A much easier solution might be right under our noses, according to a new paper from Jayanth Chennamangalam and his co-authors - mine the remnants of asteroids that hit the Moon.

Deep cracks stretching hundreds of kilometers across the Martian surface might look like simple scars from ancient impacts, but they're actually windows into a surprisingly dynamic planetary history. New images from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft reveal how these valleys, filled with slow moving rivers of ice and rock, have preserved evidence of climate swings far more extreme than anything Earth has experienced. The story written in these Martian fractures challenges our view of the red planet.

‘Float rocks,’ sand ripples, and vast distances are among the sights to see in the latest high-resolution panorama by NASA's Perseverance rover, taken on a particularly clear day.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have found strong evidence of a giant planet orbiting a star in the stellar system closest to our own Sun. At just 4 light-years away from Earth, the Alpha Centauri triple star system has long been a compelling target in the search for worlds beyond our solar system.

Astronomers at the South African MeerKAT observatory have discovered the most distant flash of radio waves to date, most likely stemming from activity around a magnetar.

The post A Fast Radio Burst from the Early Universe appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

United Launch Alliance lofted an experimental navigation satellite on the first national security mission of its new Vulcan Centaur rocket on Tuesday night (Aug. 12).