|  If Pluto Keeps Spewing Nitrogen, Why Is It Still Full of It?  | Something mysterious is happening on the surface of Pluto: No matter how much nitrogen the atmosphere releases into space, it's still chock-full of the stuff. New work examines the possible culprits for the stealthy nitrogen resupply, hinting at active geologic activity inside the dwarf planet. Pluto's atmosphere has 10,000 times lower pressure than Earth's at the surface, and hundreds of tons of nitrogen are escaping every hour.
| Read More » Japanese Supply Ship to Launch Toward Space Station: How to Watch Live  | A robotic Japanese cargo ship will launch toward the space station Wednesday morning (Aug. 19), and you can watch the liftoff live. You can watch a webcast of the HTV-5 launch live, beginning at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT), courtesy of NASA TV. If all goes according to plan, the freighter will arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday (Aug. 24) after a five-day flight.
| Read More » Ghostly Particles Detected Beneath Earth  | Using giant vats of organic liquid buried under a mountain in Italy, scientists have shed new light on the origins of ghostly particles known as neutrinos generated by the Earth. This research could yield insights into what radioactive elements lie deep inside the Earth and how they influence the churning of the Earth's innards, researchers added. Neutrinos are subatomic particles generated by nuclear reactions and the radioactive decay of unstable atoms.
| Read More » 'Winged Monster' Rock Art Finally Deciphered  | The mystery surrounding the ancient rock paintings of Utah's Black Dragon Canyon has finally been solved. For decades, researchers and creationists have debated whether the vibrant red pictographs are images of humans and animals, or rather, depictions of a large winged monster, possibly a pterosaur. It is not a pterodactyl," said co-lead researcher Paul Bahn, a freelance archaeologist.
| Read More » Japan Launches Vital Supplies (and Mice) Toward International Space Station  | A robotic Japanese cargo vessel launched toward the International Space Station this morning, embarking on a five-day journey to the orbiting lab to deliver tons of supplies and experiment gear, including a rodent crew of 12 mice.
| Read More » 'Corpse Flower' Blooms in Denver: How to Watch Live  | The first-ever bloom of a stinky "corpse flower" in the Rocky Mountain region is happening here today (Aug. 19). The corpse flower, or titan arum, is famous for its rare-but-enormous blossoms. But what really makes corpse flowers famous is their stench.
| Read More » Young Children Aim for 'Tomorrowland' in Summer Space Challenge  | A summer challenge sponsored by X Prize and Disney Junior invites kids ages 2 to 8 to develop "out-of-this-world" creations — and the grand prize is a trip to Florida's Kennedy Space Center to see a SpaceX rocket launch. Celebrities kicked off the challenge, called "Miles from Tomorrowland: Space Missions," last month at the New York Hall of Science by leading children in STEAM-based art projects and activities. The technology award organization X Prize is well known for a $30 million series of lunar mission milestone awards co-sponsored by Google, and it has teamed up with Disney before for a video contest focused on older kids.
| Read More » E-Cigarette Use May Be Gateway to Conventional Smoking Teens who use electronic cigarettes may be more likely to start smoking conventional tobacco products than teens who have never tried e-cigarettes, according to a new study. "The study found that 14-year-olds who had used e-cigarettes for recreational purposes were four times more likely to start smoking at least one harmful tobacco product — including regular cigarettes, a hookah tobacco water pipe and/or cigars — over the next year," said Adam Leventhal, an associate professor of preventive medicine and psychology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and a co-author of the study, published today (Aug. 18) in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The new study showed a link between e-cigarette use in teens and an increased chance of smoking other products later on, but it did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between them, Leventhal noted. Read More » To Build a Gas Giant Planet, Just Add Pebbles  | Gas-giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn form quickly by scooping up pebble-size building blocks and pushing smaller potential planets out of the way, new research suggests. Over time, the dust grains clump together to form pebbles, asteroid-size planetesimals and eventually whole planets, clearing out paths through the dust and debris. "This is the first model that we know about that you start out with a pretty simple structure for the solar nebula from which planets form, and end up with the giant-planet system that we see," study lead author Harold Levison, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, told Space.com.
| Read More » | |
