Science

With its proton beams, the newly enhanced Large Hadron Collider (LHC) set a new world record. The LHC, which is housed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, reopened on April 22 after a planned three-year sabbatical during which the facility was upgraded. These improvements are already being put to the test, and the LHC has already broken a previous record in restarting and preparing for its new working phase, known as Run 3. This particle accelerator is the world's biggest and most powerful. The LHC accelerated protons to…

Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX was due to launch the next long-duration astronaut crew to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA early on Wednesday, including a medical doctor turned spacewalker and a geologist specializing in Martian landslides.The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Freedom, was set for liftoff with its four-member crew at 3:52 am EDT (0752 GMT, or 1.22pm IST) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.If…

In its more than 30 years of service, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made over 1.3 million observations of intriguing cosmic events and bodies. It once captured a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147, using its prime working camera – the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The “Hubble Classic” image has been again shared on Instagram. The image shows the two galaxies oriented in a way that they appear to form the number 10 in the vast dark sky. While the object on the left, or the “1”, appears…

Days after a SpaceX Dragon capsule crewed by wealthy adventurers splashed down off Florida's coast, another launched Wednesday, this time for a NASA mission to the International Space Station.The Crew-4 mission blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 3:52 am (0752 GMT, or 1:22pm IST), carrying Americans Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins, as well as Italian Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency.The event was livestreamed on NASA's website and social media.The rapid turnaround time for SpaceX…

Since he closed the deal to buy Twitter a few days ago, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk appears to have been bombarded with requests to fix other products of public use. Though he must be enjoying the attention, he also appears to be frustrated by these requests. The Tesla founder has a reputation of making startling statements and following through on some of them when least expected. Twitter users dug out his old tweets and some even circulated fake ones to suggest Musk had desired to buy some successful companies to…

Update April 27th, 4:18AM ET: SpaceX successfully launched the crew from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 3:52AM ET. The astronauts will now spend roughly 17 hours en route to the ISS, and are due to dock with the space station at around 8:15PM ET, reports Reuters. Original Story: In the early morning hours, SpaceX is set to launch its seventh crewed mission to orbit, this time sending three NASA astronauts and an Italian astronaut to the International Space Station. Their launch will spark the beginning of a six-month…

More than one in five of the world’s reptile species are threatened with extinction, researchers have determined in a new paper that marks the culmination of more than 20 years of slow-going research. On top of facing human-caused threats to their survival, the scaled creatures have fallen victim to bias in conservation priorities. Conservationists with limited resources have had to play catch-up in their efforts to assess threats to turtles, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and tuatara (the last in an ancient lineage of…

In addition to being a magically empowered superhero, Steven Grant, the main character of Marvel’s Moon Knight series, is a man living with dissociative identity disorder, a condition in which someone’s personality and sense of self fragment in response to severe psychological trauma. Moon Knight’s only just begun to explain certain things about its hero, like why Steven — who’s clearly an American — loses significant chunks of time or why he’s putting on such an unconvincing accent while living in England. But all of…

Climate change is pushing mammals into new territory, increasing the number of opportunities for viruses to jump from species to species — including humans. By 2070, if global temperatures continue to rise as predicted, there could be a total of 15,000 new cross-species “viral sharing events,” according to new research published today in the journal Nature. Of the at least 10,000 virus species in mammals capable of infecting humans, most are still only circulating among animals in the wild. The worry is that more of…

Elinor Karlsson has never owned a dog. But ever since she was a graduate student, she’s been studying dog genetics. (They’re good models for studying genetic diseases in humans.) Part of that work involved collecting genetic and behavioral data on thousands of dogs. And all that data meant the research team could ask a question Karlsson had been wondering for years: does a dog’s breed really say anything about how that dog acts? “Everybody was assuming that breed was predictive of behavior in dogs,” said Karlsson, now…