A schematic of what the authors think the landscape and human activity was like over the last 1,200 years in the Fish Lake Plateau region. A) 1,200 to 500 years ago, high density of people hunting, harvesting wild plants and cultivating crops. They controlled the fire regime with cultural burning […]
An artist’s impression of the rocky exoplanet GJ 1132 b, which may have regained an atmosphere after shedding its primordial one. ILLUSTRATION: R. HURT/NASA/ESA ABOUT 40 LIGHT-YEARS outside our solar system is a rocky planet so close to its host star that it takes about one and a half Earth days […]
In the recent past, space missions dedicated to the study of astrophysical signals in the high-energy spectrum revealed a series of enigmatic excesses not predicted by the theoretical models. In order to find an explanation for these anomalies, many solutions have been proposed. The most exciting hypothesis invokes the contribution […]
Image of Nok terracotta figurines. Credit: Goethe University A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from Goethe University, Frankfurt, has found the first evidence for ancient honey hunting, locked inside pottery fragments from prehistoric West Africa, dating back some 3,500 years ago. Honeybees are an iconic […]
Heart of darkness: A view of the accretion disc around the supermassive black hole, with jet-like structures flowing away from the disc. The extreme mass of the black hole bends spacetime, allowing the far side of the accretion disc to be seen as an image above and below the black […]
ANIMATION On April 20, 2021, ESA will host the 8th European Conference on Space Debris from Darmstadt, in Germany. Scientists, engineers, industry experts, and policymakers will spend the virtual four-day conference discussing the latest issues surrounding space debris. They will exchange the latest research, try to come up with solutions […]
At the fringes of the Greenland Ice Sheet, where glaciers are constantly melting, water rushes everywhere through an intricate system of lakes and streams that branch out like slip and slide shoots of super chilled, bright turquoise water. Some of that water eventually cascades straight into the surrounding land and […]
Illustration Credit: Cortland Johnson | PNNL Small stockpiles of biomass such as sewage, food waste, and wood chips are often overlooked in visions of future sustainable fuel and chemical production. The dismissal arises because transporting these materials to a large-scale, centralized bio-refinery would require more energy than they produce. Yet […]
Illustration of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech The Ingenuity team has identified a software solution for the command sequence issue identified on Sol 49 (April 9) during a planned high-speed spin-up test of the helicopter’s rotors. Over the weekend, the team considered and tested multiple potential solutions to […]
Space missions often have to go where the sun don’t shine. Or at least where it shines very faintly. That is particularly important if the mission draws its power from the sun. Luckily, engineers have a way of dealing with that problem – just make really really big solar panels. […]