Category: Worth Knowing

An Almost-Blood Moon Is Coming Thursday Night Don’t let the word “partial” fool you. When most people hear the words “partial lunar eclipse,” they might assume it will be less impressive than a total eclipse — but the August 27–28 event is anything but ordinary….

China has announced the postponement of its Chang’e-7 lunar mission, which had been expected to conduct ambitious explorations on the moon, including searching for water ice. The mission represented a significant step in China’s growing space program. No new launch date or official reason for the delay was immediately provided by Chinese authorities.

Pre-construction surveys at California’s Ivanpah solar facility drastically underestimated the local desert tortoise population, predicting just 32 when nearly 1,000 were actually found. The discovery halted construction for three months and cost $56 million to relocate the tortoises. One microchipped juvenile was later tracked to a surprising location — an eagle’s nest.

Biology’s Most Fundamental Rule Has an Exception For decades, biology textbooks have enshrined a simple rule: DNA is made by copying a template. One enzyme unzips a DNA double helix into separate strands, and another called a polymerase builds a complementary sequence, base by base,…

A Record-Breaking Journey Earns a Historic Honor NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, became the first humans to travel around the Moon in more than half a century — and now they’re about to…

A Leap Into the Coldest Place in the Solar System China is poised to launch Chang’e-7, its most technologically complex lunar mission to date, in its search for frozen stores of water in permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s south pole. The launch window opens…

Astronomers have discovered a massive asteroid that should be tearing itself apart but isn’t. The 710-metre space rock, roughly the width of eight football fields, completes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes — a speed that would normally rip apart a loosely packed rubble-pile asteroid. Observations from the Rubin Observatory suggest the object must have rock-like internal cohesion to hold together at such speeds.

New research from San Jose State University reveals that the San Andreas Fault is moving faster than scientists previously believed. The findings raise fresh questions about seismic risk in the region. Researchers shared details of their study, though the exact rate of slippage and its potential implications for earthquake hazards in the Bay Area are still being analyzed.

A Tiny Antenna With a Big Job When the trio of NASA’s SkyFall helicopters takes to the Martian skies, one of their tasks will be to hunt for frozen water — a critical resource for future astronauts — using ground-penetrating radar. That sounds straightforward enough….

A Planet That Shouldn’t Exist Astronomers have found a world that, by all conventional logic, shouldn’t look the way it does. The newly discovered exoplanet GJ 523b is unusually massive and dense, challenging conventional ideas about how rocky planets form. Called GJ 523b, the exoplanet…