Tag: science news

Extinct volcanoes could help sate humanity’s hunger for rare earth elements

September 26, 2024 admin

Scientists found that some rare magma types are surprisingly efficient at concentrating rare earth elements. | Photo Credit: Shutterstock Extinct volcanoes are hard to study – we never see them erupt. Using a unique experimental technique, we were able to recreate a certain type of extinct volcano in a lab, learning more about the magma…

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Evolution can change how an ecosystem collapses, study finds

September 25, 2024 admin

Dying coral reefs, rainforests transforming into savannas, grasslands turning into deserts – these are ecosystem “tipping points”, boundary lines we’re desperate not to cross. In dynamic systems filled with life, these critical thresholds aren’t set in stone. Since organisms can evolve, the tipping points within these ecosystems might evolve too. Most of us think of…

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Earth is getting a new mini-moon, and it won’t be the first or the last

September 25, 2024 admin

Earth is going to have its very own mini-moon from September 29 until November 25. The regular Moon’s new, temporary friend is 2024 PT₅, an asteroid captured from the Arjuna asteroid group (called the “Arjunas”). | Photo Credit: AFP Earth is going to have its very own mini-moon from September 29 until November 25. The regular Moon’s…

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Russian Soyuz brings crew of three back from International Space Station

September 25, 2024 admin

The Soyuz MS-25 space capsule carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew, formed of Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, lands in a remote area near Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan September 23, 2024. | Photo Credit: Reuters A Russian Soyuz capsule landed on the Kazakh steppe on Monday, bringing two Russian cosmonauts…

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In a single finger bone, scientists find signs of Britain’s largest flying animal

September 19, 2024 admin

A handout illustration shows the newly identified Jurassic Period flying reptile, or pterosaur, called ‘Dearc sgiathanach’, whose fossil was found on a rocky beach at Scotland’s Isle of Skye, flying alongside a large meat-eating dinosaur. | Photo Credit: Reuters Scientists have estimated the size of an extinct flying reptile called a pterosaur, based on fragments of a…

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CERN supercollider discovers heaviest particles can entangle

September 19, 2024 admin

One of the most surprising predictions of physics is entanglement, a phenomenon where objects can be some distance apart but still linked together. The best-known examples of entanglement involve tiny chunks of light (photons), and low energies. At the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the world’s largest particle accelerator, an experiment called ATLAS has just…

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Faraway black hole unleashes record-setting energetic jets

September 19, 2024 admin

This artist’s concept shows a galaxy with a brilliant quasar, a very bright, distant and active supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, at its center, seen in this undated handout picture. | Photo Credit: Reuters Two mighty beams of energy have been detected shooting in opposite…

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Intuitive Machines clinches $4.8 bln navigation services contract from NASA

September 18, 2024 admin

Intuitive Machines clinches .8 bln navigation services contract from NASA

The Nova-C lunar lander designed by aerospace company Intuitive Machines is displayed at the company’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, U.S., October 3, 2023. | Photo Credit: Reuters Intuitive Machines said on Tuesday (September 18, 2024) it has bagged a navigation and communication services contract of up to $4.82 billion from NASA for missions in the…

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Hidden craters suggest earth once had a Saturn-like ring

September 17, 2024 admin

The rings of Saturn are some of the most famous and spectacular objects in the Solar System. Earth may once have had something similar. In a paper published last week in Earth & Planetary Science Letters, my colleagues and I present evidence that Earth may have had a ring. The existence of such a ring, forming around…

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Polaris Dawn: why world’s first private spacewalk wasn’t just a vanity project

September 17, 2024 admin

This handout photo provided by SpaceX and Polaris on September 15, 2024 shows the manned Polaris Dawn mission’s “Dragon” capsule aboard the rescue vessel after it splashed down off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Florida, after completing the first human spaceflight mission by non-government astronauts of the Polaris Program. | Photo Credit: AFP Two astronauts…

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