Science Glance
White smoke rose in the air and green dye coloured the ocean to guide the USS Anchorage and smaller recovery vessels to the spot where Nasa’s Orion crew capsule splashed down to Earth after a flawless and awe-inspiring test flight on Friday.
Cameras mounted inside Orion caught the casual splendour of the world turning beneath it as the empty capsule lapped the planet twice before tearing into the atmosphere on its journey home at 20,000 mph.
As its heatshield rose to twice the temperature of molten lava, Orion popped its parachutes and gently floated down, scoring a bullseye on its target landing site off the coast of Baja California in Mexico at 4.29pm GMT.
Orion spacecraft's flawless test flight puts Mars exploration one step closer
Einstein documents digitization project complete
Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can now explore more than 80,000 pages of documents left behind by the world's most famous physics genius, Albert Einstein.
The now-complete Digital Einstein project -- the online phase of the Einstein Papers project and a collaboration between Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (to whom the scientist bequeathed his intellectual legacy) -- is nearly two decades in the making. Researchers began sorting through the physicist's letters, papers, postcards, notebooks and diaries in 1986.
Intel creates a new tool to help Stephen Hawking communicate
Eddie Redmayne is learning about much more than the beguiling life of Stephen Hawking, whom he plays in the recently released biopic Theory of Everything.
At Intel Labs here, the Tony-winning actor is on hands and knees to get a better look at a specially tailored communications system for Hawking, who has a motor neuron disease (MND) related to ALS that has worsened over the years, rendering him nearly paralyzed.
World's first computer dates to 205 BCE, earlier than thought
Long considered the world's first computer, the Antikythera Mechanism is now thought to be 100 years older than first determined, researchers said.
The bronze mechanism, discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, was initially dated to 150 to 100 BCE, but researchers now found that it recorded a solar eclipse that happened on May 12, 205 BCE.
9,300-year-old mummified bison discovered in Siberia
Members of the Yukagir tribe in Siberia discovered a 9,300-year-old frozen bison mummy complete with all its organs and even some fur.
Details of the necropsy of the animal, which was discovered in 2011, were presented recently at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in Berlin. The animal, dubbed the Yukagir bison mummy, is a steppe bison or bison priscus, which went extinct after the Ice Age. Never has a steppe bison mummy been found so complete.
NASA Stumbles Upon A Dead Star That's 10 Million Times Brighter Than The Sun
Think our sun is bright? NASA says its NuSTAR space-based X-ray telescope has detected a dead star that pumps out as much energy as 10 million suns.
"You might think of this pulsar as the 'Mighty Mouse' of stellar remnants," Dr. Fiona A. Harrison, professor of physics and astronomy at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the principal investigator of the NuSTAR mission, said in a written statement.
NASA says it's very close to finding alien life
At a panel discussion on the search for alien life, held this week at NASA's headquarters in Washington, the agency's top scientists said they're getting close.
NASA scientists were joined by leading figures in the fields of astronomy, physics and planetary sciences.
"We believe we're very, very close in terms of technology and science to actually finding the other Earth and our chance to find signs of life on another world," Sara Seager, a physicist at MIT and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, told a packed audience on Monday.
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