Daily News update on – Science

Space.com

Astronomers observing the strange “rock comet” hybrid Phaethon as it passed the sun have found a surprise that could upend 14 years of thinking about the weird asteroid. The asteroid Phaethon, which gives us the Geminid meteor shower every year and was …

Space.com

SpaceX’s Starship has been grounded by the U.S. government following claims that the rocket’s explosive first launch spread plumes of potentially hazardous debris over homes and the habitats of endangered animals. The Federal Aviation Administration ( …

Space.com

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is now in its fifth year scanning the sky for new worlds. Since its launch on April 18, 2018, TESS has mapped over 93% of the sky from its orbit around Earth, and in that time has produced 329 …

Space.com

The chief designer of China’s Mars exploration program has provided a long-awaited comment on the status of the country’s Zhurong Mars rover. The solar-powered Zhurong rover, which is part of China’s Tianwen 1 Mars mission, had been hibernating during …

NPR

Researchers obtained DNA from all kinds of mammalian critters, like caribou, armadillos, bats, and bison. Their genetic menagerie eventually included 52 endangered species, like the giant otter and the Amazon river dolphin, as well as primates like chimps …

Space.com

Maxar Technologies’ Worldview-3 satellite has delivered images of NASA’s Landsat 8 spacecraft from ranges of between 56 miles (91.4 kilometers) and 80 miles (129.9 km), showing clear details of the powerful Earth-observation satellite.

Space.com

The Hubble Space Telescope snapped a stunning new photo of a nearby star-forming region to celebrate its 33rd launch anniversary. Located only 960 light-years away in the Perseus molecular cloud, a reflection nebula known as NGC 1333 harbors hundreds …

The New York Times

What Can You Do With a Menagerie of Mammal Genomes? DNA from monkeys, bats, whales and many other mammals is helping scientists tackle big questions about physiology, evolution and one very famous sled …

Scientific American

A new physics result two decades in the making has found a surprisingly complex path for the production of strange matter within atoms. Strange matter is any matter containing the subatomic particles known as strange quarks. “Strange” here refers …

The New York Times

Moths and other insects are drawn to lights at night as reliably as planets orbit stars. Entomologists have long exploited this fact by setting out light traps whenever they want to collect insects. Poets have reached for the image of a moth drawn to …