|  NASA's 1st Manned Flight of Orion Space Capsule May Slip to 2023  | The first manned flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft, which is being built to help humanity explore Mars and other distant destinations, may be delayed by two years, until 2023, agency officials announced today. Orion's first crewed sojourn, known as Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2), is officially targeted for launch in August 2021. Engineers and technicians are still working toward the August 2021 goal, but hitting that target is unlikely, said NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot.
| Read More » NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds Petrified Sand Dunes on Mars (Photo)  | A sweeping new panorama from NASA's Curiosity rover shows petrified sand dunes stretching across the jagged terrain of Mount Sharp on Mars. Curiosity's science team says the newly imaged dunes look similar to "crossbedding," structures formed by wind-deposited sand dunes such as those in the U.S. southwest. By looking at the sand dunes' geometry and orientation, scientists can get information about the winds that created the dunes.
| Read More » An Ocean Flows Under Saturn's Icy Moon Enceladus  | Saturn's moon Enceladus is an active water world with a global body of water sloshing around deep below its icy crust, scientists have confirmed. The smoking gun is the very slight wobble that Enceladus displays as it orbits Saturn. Instead, the moon must contain a complete ocean layer, according to new research that relied on more than seven years of images taken by NASA's Cassini space probe.
| Read More » First manned test flight of new deep-space capsule likely delayed: NASA  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The first manned test flight of NASA's new deep-space Orion capsule faces a likely two-year-year delay until 2023 due to development and budget concerns, officials with the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday. The capsule, along with its multibillion-dollar heavy lift launcher, are the most expensive parts of a long-term U.S. human space exploration initiative leading toward a crew landing on Mars in the mid-2030s. NASA had been aiming for its first crew test flight of Orion in August 2021.
| Read More » Air Pollution Kills More than 3 Million People Globally Every Year Outdoor air pollution may lead to more than 3 million premature deaths globally per year, according to a new study. About 75 percent of those deaths occur in Asia, the study found. Air pollutants such as ozone and tiny particles of toxins are linked with heart disease, lung disease and other serious afflictions that have long-term impacts on human health. Read More » Sugar beet waste product could be billion dollar 'wonder material' A Scottish company which has developed a material made from sugar beet waste believes the sky is the limit - literally. Cellucomp says its Curran product is twice as strong as carbon fibre and could one day be used to make airplane wings. Curran was invented by Cellucomp co-founders Dr David Hepworth and Dr Eric Whale, a pair of Edinburgh-based scientists looking to create a composite to rival carbon fibre. Read More » Whoa! Sun-Watching Spacecraft Finds 3,000th Comet  | A spacecraft that launched in 1995 to study the sun has discovered its 3,000th comet, further bolstering its credentials as history's greatest comet hunter. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), spotted comet number 3,000 on Sunday (Sept. 13). The landmark discovery was pulled out of SOHO's database by Worachate Boonplod of Thailand, NASA officials said.
| Read More » Boeing rejects Aerojet Rocketdyne bid for ULA launch venture  | Boeing Co on Wednesday said it had rejected an unsolicited bid from Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc for United Launch Alliance, a 50-50 rocket launch venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp . "The unsolicited proposal for ULA is not something we seriously entertained," Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher said. Boeing said it remained committed "to ULA and its business, and to continued leadership in all aspects of space, as evidenced by the agreement announced last week with Blue Origin," a company owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos that is designing the engine for a new rocket being designed by ULA.
| Read More » 'The Martian' Lands at NASA: Actors Meet Real-Life Counterparts in Houston  | Sebastian Stan and Mackenzie Davis visited the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the actors met with their characters' real-life counterparts, took a spin in a prototype rover and spoke with the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The day was capped by a preview screening of the Ridley Scott-directed film, which opens in theaters on Oct. 2. "I think you can go back and tell the other cast members that you got closer to Mars than any of them have done," said Ellen Ochoa, a shuttle-era astronaut and the director of the Johnson Space Center, referencing Stan and Davis' visit and a Martian meteorite brought out for display.
| Read More » Some Apollo Moon Samples 'Crumbling to Dust'  | Some of the moon soil collected by Apollo astronauts has deteriorated significantly during its four-plus decades on Earth, a new study reports. Scientists found that the median particle size in a set of 20 different Apollo soil samples held in laboratories for research use has decreased by more than half since the samples were first measured 40 years ago. "It might be accurate to state that the Apollo lunar soils are literally crumbling to dust," the scientists, led by Bonnie Cooper of Hanyang University in South Korea, wrote in the new study.
| Read More » Flower Power: Giant 'Starshades' Prepped for Exoplanet Hunting  | "The unique architecture of the starshade — namely, the size and separation needed — make it difficult to test cheaply," Anthony Harness, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Space.com. Harness works with Tiffany Glassman and Steve Warwick, of the aerospace company Northrop Grumman, to test starshades on Earth in dry lake beds and on mountaintops. Harness presented some of the test results at the Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science (ERES) Symposium at Pennsylvania State University in April.
| Read More » 16 Pyramids Discovered in Ancient Cemetery  | They date back around 2,000 years, to a time when a kingdom called "Kush" flourished in Sudan. Derek Welsby, a curator at the British Museum in London, and his team have been excavating at Gematon since 1998, uncovering the 16 pyramids, among many other finds, in that time.
| Read More » Energy Drinks Tied to Brain Injuries in Teens Teens who drink energy drinks a lot are more likely to get head injuries than those who don't consume the highly caffeinated beverages, a new study from Canada suggests. Students were asked about their energy drink consumption, as well as whether they had experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI), meaning they had sustained a blow to the head that left them unconscious for at least 5 minutes, or resulted in an overnight hospital stay. About 22 percent of students said they had experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in their lifetimes, and 6 percent said they'd had a TBI in the last year. Read More » Stem Cell Discovery Could Spare Cancer Patients from Nasty Side Effect People who have head and neck cancer and undergo radiation treatments often suffer from permanent damage to their salivary glands. Each year, a half-million patients worldwide with head and neck cancer undergo radiotherapy. About 40 percent of patients who have such treatments suffer major damage to their salivary glands, resulting in dry-mouth syndrome. Read More » Caffeine Confuses Your Body's Internal Clock, Study Suggests Drinking a cup of coffee at night may mess up your sleep in more ways than one: Caffeine not only keeps you awake but also affects your body's internal clock, which tells you when it's time to sleep and wake up, a new study suggests. The finding shows that caffeine "affects our physiology in a way that we hadn't really considered in the past," said Kenneth P. Wright Jr., a co-author of the study and director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Colorado. In the study, five healthy people spent a night in a laboratory, where researchers monitored their levels of melatonin, a hormone that increases at night and is an indicator of the body's internal clock, also known as circadian rhythm. Read More » Science Gets Wacky: Ig Nobel Awards Return Tonight (How to Watch Live)  | The Ig Nobel awards are a sort of half-spoof on the Nobel Prizes, the highly sought-after awards given to scientists and other academics who have made significant advancements in their respective fields. Now in its 25th year, the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony is held every year at the Sanders Theater on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The winners of Ig Nobel prizes in 2014 included a team of Norwegian scientists that studied how reindeer react to a human dressed up like a polar bear (the reindeer totally fell for it and ran away).
| Read More » 4 Tools to Help the Families of People Fighting Addiction (Op-Ed) Elizabeth Donnellan is a professor at Kaplan University College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. This information is important to an understanding of why achieving sobriety can be such a struggle for some people. Read More » Why We Must Build an 'Immune System' to Ward Off Cyber Threats (Op-Ed) Nicole Eagan is the CEO of Darktrace, a cyber threat defense company that uses technology to detect previously unidentified threats in real time, powered by machine learning and mathematics developed at the University of Cambridge. This op-ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015. Eagan contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Computer networks have evolved with those needs, becoming more complex and porous. Read More » SpaceX for the Brain: Neuroscience Needs Business to Lead (Op-Ed) Kunal Ghosh is CEO of Inscopix, Inc., a neuroscience startup based in Palo Alto, California, developing end-to-end solutions for understanding the brain in action. This op-ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015. Ghosh contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The human brain is the force behind civilization and culture. Read More » What's The Point? The Real Reason Scientists Study Space (Op-Ed)  | Hannah Rae Kerner is chair of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), executive director of the Space Frontier Foundation, and a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University studying machine learning applications for astrophysics and robotic control. Recently, my dad and I were in a Bojangles' restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina.
| Read More » Everything's Relative: The Discovery of Space-Time (Podcast) James Clerk Maxwell had no idea what he was doing. What he may not have realized was that the theory he developed sowed the seeds of a revolution that would sweep away the old Newtonian Order and usher in a new Age of Relativity. Maxwell also had a beard that would make the bartender at your local gastropub jealous. Read More » Nichelle Nichols, African-American Astronauts Honored at Gala  | DENVER — "Beyond and beyond and beyond," sings Nichelle Nichols. Nichols' voice hits the back of the hangar housing the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum. Nichols accepted the Ed Dwight Jr. award here on Aug. 29 at the Shades of Blue Gala — but not for her role on "Star Trek" as Lt. Uhura, fifth in command aboard the Starship USS Enterprise.
| Read More » Awesome SpaceX Images Show How Its Dragon Spaceship Will Land on Mars  | A gallery of gorgeous new images shows a cone-shaped space capsule shooting like a meteor through the atmosphere of Mars, and descending quickly toward the surface before its thrusters set it down gently in the middle of a rocky, uninhabited landscape. The human crew prepares to set food on the Red Planet. The gorgeous gallery was released on the Flickr page of the private Spaceflight company SpaceX, and shows what it might look like if and when the company's Dragon crew capsule makes a trip to the Red Planet.
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