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Three different varieties of plants — Mizuna mustard, Waldmann’s green lettuce and Outredgeous Red Romaine lettuce — are pictured here, growing in the Veggie plant growth chamber aboard the International Space Station. Astronauts have green thumbs, too! For the first time, an International Space Station project is growing three distinct plant crops simultaneously in space. […]

Fossil remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex, a dinosaur species that became extinct due to extreme climate conditions at the end of the Cretaceous period about 65.5 million years ago. Dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops became extinct about 66 million years ago, after an asteroid strike resulted in plunging temperatures. According to a new […]

This Saturday (Nov. 11), the bright star Regulus will briefly disappear behind the last-quarter moon, providing a treat for skywatchers across North and Central America. This will be the second time in less than a month that this particular star has appeared to pass behind the moon in the sky, in an event known as […]

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s Cartier-crafted gold lunar module model is expected to command $150,000 at auction. A solid gold model of NASA’s Apollo lunar module is now up for auction, as one of the only two others in existence remains missing after a museum heist. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s gold scale model of the spacecraft that he […]

If skies are clear this weekend, be sure to take a few moments to gaze upward. You just might be lucky and catch a glimpse of a spectacularly bright meteor from the Taurid meteor shower. While most meteor displays last about a week, the Taurids have perhaps the longest duration of overall visibility. Meteors from […]

The Leonids are one of the best meteor showers skywatchers can catch. Every November, observers can expect peaks of 10 to 15 an hour. Occasionally, the display turns sublime: every 33 years or so, there have been instances of the Leonids producing meteors at a rate of about 1,000 – or more – in an […]

Early Monday morning (Nov. 13), bright Jupiter will pass an even brighter Venus in a low but close and spectacular conjunction. The celestial highlight in the coming days will involve the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter — but only one of the two characters in our celestial show has been on stage thus far. […]

The TV series “Futurama” will air in its entirety on the Syfy channel, starting Nov. 11. Good news, everyone! The hit space-comedy series “Futurama” will air again, this time on the TV network Syfy, starting on Saturday (Nov. 11). Syfy will air the series regularly on Mondays and Tuesdays from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. […]

Nuclear thermal rockets like the one in this artistic rendering could halve the time needed for a Mars mission. Dangerous radiation. Overstuffed pantries. Cabin fever. NASA could sidestep many of the impediments to a Mars mission if they could just get there faster. But sluggish chemical rockets aren’t cutting it — and to find what […]

Actress Rosario Dawson has moved from treating superheroes to an audio treatment of “Artemis” (Crown, 2017), the new book by “The Martian” (Crown, 2014) author Andy Weir. Dawson is known for playing nurse Claire Temple in the TV series “Daredevil” and spinoff Marvel/Netflix shows, and now she narrates “Artemis,” which comes out in novel and […]

U.S. Air Force fighter jets may soon be able to instantly disable enemy targets using invisible, energized beams of light shot from a small, compact laser cannon. The laser-equipped vehicles might call to mind the heavily armed “helicarriers” from Marvel’s “Captain America” films. Yesterday (Nov 6), the U.S. Air Force Research Lab signed a $26.3 […]

This illustration shows where water rests and flows under the Antarctic ice, with blue dots indicating lakes and lines indicating rivers. Imagine drifting over Antarctica’s icy expanse. A white continent extends below you, and it’s smothered in enough frozen water to drown every coastline in the world in a 216-foot (66 meters) wave if it […]

An abstract artist’s illustration shows a high-energy hadron collision. Flit, zip, jitter, boom. Quarks, the tiny particles that make up everything tangible in the universe, remain deeply mysterious to physicists even 53 years after scientists first began to suspect these particles exist. They bop around at the edge of scientific instruments’ sensitivities, are squirreled away […]