Researchers from Ohio State working on the Tibetan plateau in China made an interesting discovery in two ice core samples the team obtained. They discovered viruses that were 15,000 years old in two of the samples that have never been seen before. Those viruses survived because they remained frozen for thousands of years.
Hubble may only just have been fixed, but NASA is wasting no time putting the iconic space telescope back to work and sharing the latest images of distant galaxies. It was a nail-biting month of unexpected downtime for Hubble, after observations came to an abrupt halt in mid-June when the payload computer which manages the telescope shut down.
Blue Origin's first crewed flight was a success today, with Jeff Bezos getting his long-awaited taste of space, and a new video shows just what it's like at the apogee of your multi-million rocket trip. New Shepard only spent a few minutes in zero-gravity, as the crew capsule passed the Kármán Line boundary that's one of the accepted definitions of where space actually begins.
Today was a big day for Blue Origin, as the company launched the first human flight on its New Shepard rocket. Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos was on this initial crewed flight, joined by his brother Mark Bezos, an 18-year-old student named Oliver Daemen, and 82-year-old Wally Funk, one of the Mercury 13 and - after today - officially the oldest person to fly to space.
Scientists from Imperial College London created a new traumatic brain injury (TBI) computer model that has mapped blood vessels in a rat brain at the highest resolution. They believe the new TBI computer model could help improve our understanding of how blood vessels are affected by injuries of this type. The model also helps researchers learn the effects on the protective layer encasing the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from harmful circulating molecules and pathogens.
Astrophysicist Thomas Buchert from the University of Lyon has a very interesting theory about the universe. Buchert and a team of researchers have been working to learn more about the universe and have been examining light from the very early universe. The team believes that the universe may be multiply connected, meaning that space is closed in on itself in all three dimensions like a massive three-dimensional doughnut.
Researchers at Stanford University have conducted a study involving high-speed cameras to reveal how bubbles form and eventually burst. The study also used analytical modeling to reveal a new popping process. The researchers are looking into bubbles popping, which seems benign on the surface because bubbles are undesirable in the oil, pharmaceutical, and bioreactor industries.
Researchers around the world use 3D printing to create a wide range of products. Typically we think of 3D printing being used for small plastic items, such as parts for cars and other small components for prototype devices. However, engineers are investigating and using 3D printing to build much larger structures in the construction industry.
SpaceX has been launching and landing rockets successfully for half a decade now, but its famed Falcon 9 is just a stepping stone in its grand plans. Elon Musk's company wants to make deep space travel to the Moon and beyond more economical, and that will require rockets far larger and more powerful than the company's own Falcon Heavy. That role will be filled by the SpaceX Starship, and the company took just a small step closer to that end goal with the successful test of what will eventually be the Super Heavy booster.
An unprecedented image of a supermassive black hole and its vast extragalactic radio jet has been captured for the first time, raising new questions about our nearest radio galaxy. The heart of Centaurus A - the fifth-brightest galaxy in the sky - is distinguished by a plume of energy moving around half the speed of light, though it's taken until now, and the Event Horizon Telescope, to visualize it closely.
Hubble is back online and back examining the mysteries of the universe, with NASA confirming that its repairs last week have restored the iconic space telescope to scientific operations. After weeks offline, a potentially risky fix was attempted on Friday, July 16, with current and past Hubble team members stepping up to rescue the instrument.
The newest sort of tasty experimentally-grown food to hit the International Space Station are chile (or chili) peppers. Red and green chili peppers, sent to the ISS in the form of Hatch chili pepper seeds, are in the process of being grown for the consumption of astronauts in the next few months. This is part of NASA's Plant Habitat-04 (PH-04) experiment.