NASA has a clear interest in saving the Swift mission. The $500 million observatory’s primary mission is detecting gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Despite its age, astrophysicists still rely on Swift’s multi-wavelength instruments to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories. But part of the reason for ..
Tag : Science
The new statistics released by PEER were made public as a result of a lawsuit PEER and other groups filed to compel the Chemical Safety Board to disclose industrial chemical releases as required by the Clean Air Act. A federal judge ruled in 2019 that communities have a right to know what hazardous chemicals are ..
The simulations that captured the localized effects of individual large impacts also produced wholesale recycling of crust back into the mantle, with material dripping down to depths of at least 600 kilometers. Johnson thinks this recycling explains why so little Hadean crust survived to the present. It also explains, he argues, the near-total absence of ..
About 14 years ago, Chrissi Kelly lost her sense of smell. She had traveled to the Czech Republic to visit family and caught some virus. Months later, when she still couldn’t smell, she made the rounds to doctors, including her general practitioner and an ear, nose and throat specialist, trying to find answers. She was ..
NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent five years traversing Jezero Crater looking for the chemical leftovers of whatever processes were at work on Mars billions of years ago. The rover has found organic carbon, but it has mostly been inside rocks that had to be drilled or abraded to expose it. But now, at an outcrop ..
Refurbishment over production… The production of 1,000 Merlin 1D engines is a remarkable milestone for any rocket engine, but it’s important to note that the Merlin 1D is reusable. The Merlin 1D has logged more than 6,000 engine flights with 1,000 units. “With Falcon’s reusability, recovering these engines has enabled continued reliability enhancements, making Merlin ..
But the complex of proteins needed to make more proteins is far too large to go through a small pore. So the researchers encased these proteins and other large materials in a different membrane and then fed those to the SpudCells. To get the two membranes—one from the SpudCell, one from its food—to interact, the ..
Shane Jacobson, CEO of the American Cancer Society, had similar thoughts. “Codifying shifting policy preferences into formal federal regulations risks triggering repeated cycles of overhaul with each change in administration,” he said in a statement. “Such back-and-forth would create a chronically unpredictable environment, making it extremely difficult for institutions and investigators to plan and sustain ..
Nature Communications, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72566-7. How did Botticelli’s model really die? Credit: Sandro Botticelli/Public domain Credit: Sandro Botticelli/Public domain One of 15th-century painter Sandro Botticelli’s most famous works is the Birth of Venus, depicting the naked goddess, newly birthed, standing in a giant scallop shell. The model for the painting (disputed by some historians) was ..
The real issue is whether publishers of scientific journals should retroactively apply contemporary standards regarding duplicate publication or self-plagiarism to historical papers. The journal publishing norms in the early 20th century were substantially different. The emphasis was on achieving the widest dissemination of knowledge across a fragmented scientific community separated by language and geographical distance, ..


