Monday, Dec 08th
Last update07:39:18 AM GMT
Science Glance
Some space missions go out with a bang, others with a victorious return to Earth, but Rosetta’s final moment was marked simply by radio silence.
Shortly after noon (BST) on Friday, the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft finally collided with the duck-shaped comet that it has been pursuing through space for twelve-and-a-half years, switched off its transmitters and hung up the phone to its controllers on Earth.
“We come in peace” might be the traditional opening gambit for aliens in science fiction, but we should be wary about beaming back a response to any advanced life-forms in real life, Stephen Hawking has warned.
Our first contact from an advanced civilisation could be equivalent to when Native Americans first encountered Christopher Columbus and things “didn’t turn out so well”, he cautioned.
Talk about cracking a cold case: Nearly 3.2 million years ago, Lucy died. Now we may know how.
Lucy, the iconic human cousin whose skeleton was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, died shortly after she fell out of a tree, according to a new study published Monday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature.
More than four decades after her discovery, Lucy remains one of oldest, best and most complete skeletons of any adult, erect-walking hominid, according to John Kappelman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas and the lead author of the study. A hominid is a member of the evolutionary family that includes great apes – such as gorillas, chimps, and orangutans, humans, and their ancestors, some of which are extinct.
For the first time, researchers have confirmed the astronomical accuracy of Britain's earliest stone structures. According to scientists at the University of Adelaide, the great circles traced the paths of the moon and sun at the time of their construction, 5,000 years ago.
"Nobody before this has ever statistically determined that a single stone circle was constructed with astronomical phenomena in mind -- it was all supposition," Gail Higginbottom, visiting research fellow at Adelaide and leader of the recent research effort, said in a news release.
A team of scientists in England have found a better way to capture carbon from power plant emissions.
The key to their new and improved technique is patented carbon-derived biomass material called Starbons. Starbons, which was pioneered a decade ago by scientists at the University of York, is made using biomass waste like food peelings and seaweed. Its key attribute is its porosity. Lots of tiny holes allow Starbons to capture lots of CO2.
A new system deployed by NASA is expected to help the development of an interplanatery space communications system that functions much like the Internet does on Earth.
NASA installed software on the International Space Station to make communication faster and easier, and it is expected to lead to an Internet system that may cover the entire solar system in the future, the agency announced.
A molecule used to create plastic might hold the key to Earth's origins.
Scientists recently discovered a chiral molecule inside a gas cloud located 28,000 light-years away from Earth, and believe it shed some light on how life formed on Earth.
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