July 22nd, 2007
A new moon has been discovered orbiting Saturn, which brings the number of satellites known to be spinning around the ringed giant to an impressive 60. The discovery was made by the Cassini Imaging Team studying images taken by the Cassini spacecraft back in May this year.
The moon has not been officially named as yet [...]
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July 12th, 2007
Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer space telescope have detected water vapour in the atmosphere of extrasolar planet HD 189733b. The planet is far from being habitable though with an average temperature of about 1000 degrees Kelvin, however the discovery has led scientists to believe that water is more common out there in the Universe than was [...]
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July 9th, 2007
The Bradshaw Foundation have a fantastic animation which depicts the migration of humans over the past 160,000 years.
It is the result of work by scientist Stephen Oppenheimer and is based on mitochondrial DNA, Y chromosome evidence, archaeology, climatology, and fossil study and tracks the routes and timing of our migration out of Africa and around [...]
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July 7th, 2007
It may or may not be the answer to life, the Universe and everything, but coincidentally 42 is the mass of our galaxy, 3 x 10 to the power of 42 kilograms to be more precise.
The mass of the Milky Way Galaxy was determined by an international team of scientists and presented this week at [...]
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June 26th, 2007
In response to a petition from the Science, Just Science campaign (good job guys!), the British Government have announced that religious garbage such as creationism and intelligent design are bullshit have no place on the science curriculum in schools.
“The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and [...]
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June 16th, 2007
An experimental scramjet engine was successfully tested this week in outback Australia. The scramjet, which is a joint development between Australian and US Defence forces reached speeds of 11,000 km/h or ten times the speed of sound! (Mach 10) during it’s 12 minute flight.
A scramjet requires supersonic airflow through the engine, to achieve this a [...]
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June 6th, 2007
This is a vid on the Pale Blue Dot, an iconic image captured by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometres (4 billion miles) on February 14, 1990.
The vid has been put together by aspiring film maker David Fu and it’s a great piece of work. Carl Sagan’s narration is [...]
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May 11th, 2007
NASA says that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is on track for launch in 2013. The new telescope will replace the awesome Hubble telescope which has been responsible for a multitude of scientific discoveries and has captured countless amazing images of our universe since its launch in 1990. The JWST will be siginificantly larger [...]
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May 4th, 2007
Following the lead of the French National Space Agency, the British Ministry of Defence is also planning to make its records of UFO sightings available to the public online. There are 24 files each documenting between 200 - 300 cases planned for release, including an event that occurred in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, in 1980 which [...]
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March 29th, 2007
China and Russia are planning a joint mission to Mars with a launch date in May 2009. The mission will use a Russian booster to send a Chinese satellite and a Russian probe dubbed “Phobos explorer” to the red planet. After a 10 month journey the plan is for the Chinese satellite to enter Martian [...]
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March 13th, 2007
The image of Io above was taken by the New Horizons probe as it recently sped through the Jupiter system on it’s way to Pluto. The image was taken with the spacecrafts Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) from a distance of 2.5 million kilometers. Clearly visible in the 11 o’clock position of the Jovian moon [...]
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