technical updates

Arctic sea ice may move in unexpected ways because individual ice floes are constantly colliding and transferring energy. Researchers found that this simple process can explain several long-standing mysteries about how quickly the ice moves and spreads. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/Td9BpOr

Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later. From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there's a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals' electrical telegraph network with current. "The Exeter train delay is a fascinating story because it sits right at the point where emerging technologies first began to encounter the realities of the...

The U.S. military must be ready to engage the enemy farther from home than ever before, according to its highest-ranking officer. "Today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space ," Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday (Sept. 16) during a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Cislunar space extends from Earth all the way out to the orbit of the moon and includes the lunar surface. For several years now, military officials have been stressing the strategic importance of this huge region, which could get quite a bit busier in the next decade or so. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Sept. 16, 2026. (...

The winners of the first-ever Neil Armstrong Space Prize just got their hardware. Those awardees — the people who developed and mastered the famous landing capability of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket — were announced in April. But they didn't actually receive the prize until Tuesday night (Sept. 15), when it was bestowed during a ceremony at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. And it was richly deserved, according to Purdue University, which created the international award and named it after perhaps its most famous alumnus. (Purdue is known as the "cradle of astronauts," because 30 of its graduates have flown in space or been selected as NASA astronaut candidates.) " Neil Armstrong 's achievement rested on extraordinary engineering, teamwork and the courage to attempt what had never been done before," Mark Lundstrom, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Enginee...

As the newest heavy hitter in orbital observatories continues the journey to its final destination, NASA has begun the process of switching the spacecraft on. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on Aug. 30, and is on a three-month long trek to Lagrange point two (L2). L2 is a relatively idle orbital sweet spot almost a million miles from Earth that will allow Roman to remain on the planet's night side and keep the bright sun to its back. It's an optimal location for the telescope to operate its two primary instruments , the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and its Coronagraph Instrument . Neither are ready to begin collecting science, and will undergo another month or so of calibrations and tests before Roman can begin its mission, but initial downlinks from the telescope indicate nominal readings on its components as NASA teams continue its commissioning. "This is a huge m...

The U.S. Space Force is opening up about its operation of orbital weapons, but not much beyond admitting that they exist. During a "State of the Space Force" address at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Tuesday (Sept. 15), Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess stated unequivocally that the Space Force uses active space -based weaponry to support United States national defense. “Let me be crystal clear: Today, Guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said, referring to the official name for Space Force personnel. Space is central to national security infrastructure and warfighting efforts, and serves a critical role in how the military communicates, navigates, conducts operations and tracks threats globally. It’s become an increasingly co...

We now have a launch date for Starship's most ambitious mission to date. SpaceX announced today (Sept. 15) that it's targeting Sept. 22 for the first orbital flight of Starship , the fully reusable megarocket that the company is developing to help humanity settle the moon, Mars and more. Liftoff, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, will occur during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT and 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes. Starship Die Cast Rocket Model Was $47.99 Now $39.99 on Amazon . Even if you can't see SpaceX's Starship in person, you can score a model of your own. Standing at 13.77 inches (35 cm), this is a 1:375 ratio of SpaceX's Starship as a desktop model. The materials here are alloy steel and it weighs just 225g. View Deal The upcoming flight will be the 14th overall for Sta...

Could we find alien technology embedded in moon dust? The bold idea, not yet peer-reviewed, suggests checking out the lunar surface for "microscopic technosignatures." The SETI Institute — or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute — describes these technosignatures as "tiny engineered particles" that may have come from interstellar space before settling on the moon . The institute recently highlighted a paper on the topic, published on arxiv in August, and added the research is undergoing peer review for consideration in the International Journal of Astrobiology. The study is led by SETI Institute Affiliate Scientist Lewis Pinault. "The moon has been quietly accumulating material from space for billions of years, much of it likely billions of years older than the moon itself," said Pinault in a statement . "We're asking whether that ancien...

More than 60 years after surveys suggested a deep coral reef off Benin was probably dead, scientists have found it alive. Cameras revealed healthy-looking coral patches supporting multiple fish species more than 50 meters beneath the surface. The discovery suggests West Africa’s coastal waters may contain other overlooked reefs that have yet to be documented. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/pbdXkNu

If this summer felt hotter than usual, you're not alone. As it turns out, this past summer was the hottest on record in the United States. This is the hottest that summer in the U.S. has been in at least 132 years. Specifically, the temperatures rose to 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.67 degrees Celsius) above average, beating out the most recent record set in 2021 of 0.4 degrees F (0.22 degrees C) above average, according to a new report from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And looking month-to-month, this was also the hottest August we've ever seen. The record-breaking season saw unmatched temperature highs across the contiguous U.S. (all of the adjoining states, excluding Alaska and Hawaii which just aren't a part of this record) from June through August. But scorching temperatures aren't all that this new record reveals, as this summer was also one of the drie...

It has now been just over a year since the comet 3I/ATLAS first captured the world's attention as the third known object to fly through our solar system from beyond. Astronomers are still learning new things about where exactly it came from. For the first time ever, they've been able to study charged particles in the tail of the interstellar comet . This has told them that 3I/ATLAS contains more nitrogen than the typical comet from our own solar system — revealing a tantalizing clue about how the strange comet formed. "Finding that it's so rich in nitrogen tells us it likely formed in extremely cold conditions, far from its home star," Lea Ferellec, a research fellow at Northumbria University, said in a statement . Ferellec's group used the William Herschel Telescope in Spain's Canary Islands. One of this telescope's instruments is a fiber-optic weave named,...

Two European Earth-observing spacecraft will lift off from South America tonight (Sept. 14), and you can watch the action live. A Vega C rocket carrying the FLEX and Copernicus-3C satellites is scheduled to launch from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 9:21 p.m. EDT (10:21 p.m. local time in Kourou and 0121 GMT on Sept. 15). You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of the European Space Agency , or directly via ESA . Coverage will begin at 8:50 p.m. EDT (0050 GMT). A Vega C rocket is scheduled to launch ESA's FLEX satellite and the Copernicus Sentinel-3C spacecraft from French Guiana on Sept. 14, 2026. (Image credit: ESA-M. Pédoussaut) The 875-pound (397-kilogram) FLEX will detect and monitor vegetation fluorescence, which explains its name (a shortening of "Fluorescence Explorer"). By doing so, it will map plant photosynthetic activity — something no sate...

When had an early preview of the Unistellar Envisions earlier this year, our editor-in-chief Tariq Malik said they felt like something out of Star Trek . I have been very excited about getting my hands on these for a long time and I can't wait to use them to identify stars and constellations in the night sky. You can preorder the Unistellar Envision AR smart binoculars right now, available for $1499 exclusively from Unistellar. Unistellar announced that pre-orders were opening for the highly-anticipated Envisions at this year's IFA 2026 conference in Berlin and have delivered more details on the type of functionality customers can expect. The 10x50 smart binoculars can be used with or without the augmented reality overlay that is able to recognise constellations, planets and deep-sky objects in real time, with more functionality expected to be released within the coming months. Pre-orde...

The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have teamed up to target some of the smallest, most distant objects in the solar system, discovering that the history of these tiny objects is more puzzling than we'd realized. The two orbiting observatories collectively discovered 27 new Trans-Neptunian Objects , or TNOs, all less than 25 miles (40 kilometers) across, with the smallest being only 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter. As their name suggests, TNOs orbit the sun from far beyond Neptune . Some of them were born out there, at the dawn of the solar system , as small planetesimals unable to take the extra step to form planets. Models of how these TNOs formed predicted that they should have been peppered with impacts that mixed up their surface material so that their composition, and therefore color, would be different than larger TNOs. Yet new observations, led by two PhD candidates, Anast...

SpaceX lofted three telecom satellites to orbit today (Sept. 13) on a milestone mission for the company. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 2:49 p.m. EDT (1849 GMT), carrying the final three satellites for Luxembourg-based SES' O3b mPOWER constellation. It was the 700th mission to date for SpaceX's Falcon rocket family, according to the company . That family first spread its wings in March 2006 when the Falcon 1 debuted. The Falcon 1 flew a total of five times, twice successfully, before giving way to the workhorse Falcon 9 in 2010. The Falcon 9 has conducted the vast majority of the family's flights; the only other member, the still-active Falcon Heavy, has launched 13 times to date. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches three O3b mPOWER satellites for the telecom company SES from Florida on Sept. 13, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)...

On Sept. 13, 2007, Japan launched the Kaguya spacecraft on a mission to the moon. Formally known as SELENE, which is short for SELenological and ENgineering Explorer, it was Japan's second moon mission. Kaguya launched from Tanegashima Space Center on a Japanese H-IIA rocket and looped around the Earth twice before heading to the moon. NOTE: While the launch occurred on Sept. 13 in the evening Eastern Time, it was actually 10:31 a.m. on Sept. 14 at the launch site. The spacecraft carried 14 science instruments and two tiny microsatellites to map the moon's surface and study its gravitational field. After a 20-day journey, Kaguya arrived at the moon . The mission consisted of three spacecraft: a main orbiter, a small communications satellite, and a third small satellite to map the moon's gravitational field. After about a year of lunar observations, the mission ended with a planned ...

GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound may increase hair-loss risk by 7% in men who are already genetically susceptible to male-pattern baldness. The findings suggest thinning hair may not be caused only by rapid weight loss and could also reflect a biological link between GLP-1 activity and hair follicles. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/pjOmFix

Some stargazing feels like you know exactly what you are looking for, but you're still slightly unsure whether you are actually seeing it. Zodiacal light — meaning "light from the circle of animals" — is often like that. I have chased this so-called "false dawn" for years, and the first few minutes are always the same. I stare toward the horizon and wonder whether the sky is genuinely brighter there, or whether I am simply seeing distant light pollution, the first hint of morning twilight, or something my eyes have invented because I badly want to see it. However, under a genuinely dark sky — and particularly in a long-exposure image — its cone shape becomes obvious. Zodiacal light is enormous. It appears as a broad, softly glowing pyramid rising from the horizon. It can be fainter than the Milky Way and has no hard edges, which is precisely why it is so easy to overlook....