Thruster burn complete🔥! ESA Euclid is on its way to Lagrange point 2

It'll take a month to get there. #DarkUniverse, we'll soon be turning on the lights
Source: @esaoperations

NASA Seals Volunteers Into Isolated Habitat For Year-Long Experiment

On June 25, 2023, a crew of four volunteers entered a simulated Martian habitat, from which they will not emerge for over a year. Their mission: to learn more about the logistics – and the human psychology – of living long-term on another planet, without ever leaving the ground.

The mission is called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) and is the first of three planned simulations between now and 2026, each of which will teach scientists progressively more about what it takes for long-duration human spaceflight to succeed.

Article
@EverythingScience

Norway discovers massive underground deposit of high-grade phosphate rock

Big enough to satisfy world demand for fertilisers, solar panels and electric car batteries over the next 100 years.

Now that the exploration phase is over, Norge Mining is looking to move the project on to the next stage of mining production.

Article
@EverythingScience

Time Appears to Have Run 5 Times Slower in The Early Universe

Because of a peculiar effect velocity has on the appearance of the passage of time, our observations make it seem like time ran slower when the Universe was young.

At least, that's how it appears to us, at a light travel time of nearly 13 billion years away. This is called time dilation, and astrophysicist Geraint Lewis and statistician Brendon Brewer have seen it in the early Universe for the first time by studying the fluctuations of bright galaxies called quasar galaxies during the Cosmic Dawn.

Article
@EverythingScience

Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing

Initially published by a Korean team last Friday, frantic work is underway throughout the research world to validate the paper's claims. For now, two separate sources have already provided preliminary confirmations that this might actually be the real thing.

Article
@EverythingScience

ESA’s Euclid Spacecraft Snaps Its First Test Images

Euclid, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA, will observe billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years to create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe, with the third dimension representing time itself.

Article
@EverythingScience

Exposure to Certain Fragrances During Sleep Dramatically Boosts Cognitive Function

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine recently uncovered strong evidence that enriching the air with fragrances improves cognitive performance by strengthening a critical connection between neurological areas involving memory and decision-making.

Article
@EverythingScience

NASA back in touch with Voyager 2 after 'interstellar shout'

The Deep Space Network used the highest-power transmitter to send the command (the 100-kw S-band uplink from the Canberra site) and timed it to be sent during the best conditions during the antenna tracking pass in order to maximize possible receipt of the command by the spacecraft.

The probe began returning science and telemetry data at 12:29 am Eastern Time on August 4, "indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory."

Article
@EverythingScience

‍11 Years Ago Today, Curiosity Successfully Landed in Gale Crater on Mars

Since then, Curiosity has been climbing the five-kilometer-tall Mount Sharp. In recent weeks, Curiosity faced its toughest climb yet, with 23-degree slopes and wheel-sized rocks.

Article
@EverythingScience

Scientists Regrow Retinal Cells in The Lab Using Nanotechnology

The degeneration is the consequence of damaged retinal pigment cells. Our bodies are unable to grow and replace these cells once they start dying, so scientists have been exploring alternative methods to replace them and the membrane within which they sit.

"In the past, scientists would grow cells on a flat surface, which is not biologically relevant."

"Using these new techniques the cell line has been shown to thrive in the 3D environment provided by the scaffolds."

Article
@EverythingScience

US Lab Achieves Fusion Ignition in Repeat of Breakthrough Experiment

For a second time since its landmark fusion event in 2022, the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) has squeezed enough energy out of a diamond capsule packed with hydrogen to keep the fusion reaction running. [aka net positive fusion]

Though still far short of producing a reliable, self-sustaining source of power for the community, the repeat achievement is bound to provide vital information on how to improve the technology.

Article
@EverythingScience

Professor Says He's Invented A Real-life "Freeze Ray"

The problem with being in space or an extremely thin atmosphere is that there's "very little air that can cool," Hopkins explained. Bringing a bunch of coolant isn't a great solution, either, "because that’s going to increase the weight, and you lose efficiency."

A prototype device, as detailed in a new paper his team published in the journal ACS Nano, takes advantage of an unusual physical property of plasma, which is commonly referred to as the "fourth state of matter."

In previous experiments, Hopkins and his colleagues found that a purple jet of plasma cooled a gold-plated surface before heating it up — a puzzling yet replicable result...

Article
@EverythingScience

Some Meteorites Are Mysteriously Magnetic, And We Finally Know Why

One of the striking things about iron meteorites is that they are often magnetic. The magnetism isn't strong, but it holds information about their origin.

One type of meteorite, known as IVA, is known to be fragments of smaller asteroids. Small asteroids don't have strong magnetic fields, so IVA meteorites shouldn't be magnetic, but many of them are. There's a new study showing how that's possible.

Article
@EverythingScience