[ April 29, 2016 ] Japan gives up on rescuing black hole observatory News and other top stories.

• [ April 29, 2016 ] Japan gives up on rescuing black hole observatory News

  

  Artist’s concept of Japan’s Hitomi satellite. Credit: JAXA/Akihiro Ikeshita Japan’s space agency says it has ceased efforts to rescue a failed X-ray astronomy satellite after it spun out of control and broke apart in orbit, declaring the nearly $400 million mission lost two months after its launch. Controllers on the ground lost contact with the Hitomi mission March 26 after a series of attitude control failures caused the satellite spin up and shed critical segments of its solar panels, accord..

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• Strange comet may reveal clues about Earth's birth

  

  A new kind of comet that is nearly tailless has been discovered -- and the surprises don't stop there. The new comet recently returned from the edge of the solar system but may have originated much closer to the sun, scientists say. In fact, it may even reveal clues about the building blocks of Earth.Given the nearly tailless appearance of this new comet, the scientists named it a Manx object, after Manx cats, which are mostly tailless."I always tell my students that science is 99-percent hard ..

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• Massive Lake Discovered Beneath Antarctic Ice May Be Teeming With Life

  

  Three different papers have revealed findings on Lake Whillans, one of the subglacial lakes detected beneath Antarctic ice. Shown above is a map of subglacial lakes in the continent. (Photo : NASA Earth Observatory | Wikimedia Commons) These are exciting times to study Antarctica and zero in on what possibly lies beneath its thick ice. A massive lake discovered barely a decade ago, for instance, may be filled with hidden life. Three separate studies from institutions across the United States o..

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• 'A Beautiful Planet': A 3D Film of Earth from Space

  

  The new IMAX documentary "A Beautiful Planet," filmed by astronauts on the International Space Station, illuminates life on the station and the beauty and fragility of the Earth it overlooks. The film, which will be shown in IMAX theaters on April 29, incorporates 15 months of footage from the space station, and offers a rare glimpse of Earth from afar as well as insight into the day-to-day activities of the crews that lived and worked on the station during that time. The film's narrati..

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• Republicans warming up to climate change - The Courier

  

  Kentucky's two U.S. Senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, show no signs of evolving on their contrarian views of climate change. But across America, new polling shows their fellow Republicans' opinions may be thawing along with the polar ice cap.Expedition 46 flight engineer Tim Peake of the European Space Agency (ESA) shared this nighttime photograph with his social media followers on Jan. 25, 2016, writing, "Beautiful night pass over Italy, Alps and Mediterranean." (Photo: NASA)While just 4..

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• Kennewick Man set to receive Native American burial

  

  Beer in hand, 21-year-old Will Thomas bent down in the middle of the Columbia River to grab what he thought was a rock. “Look, Dave,” he reportedly told his friend Dave Deacy. It was 1996, and the college students were trying to sneak into a boat race near Kennewick, Washington. Their master plan, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was to check out girls. “I found a head,” he joked. It wasn’t until after he lifted the skull out of the water that Thomas realized his jest wasn’t factually in..

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• Large Hadron Collider Goes Offline After Critter Chews Up Power Cable

  

  The world’s most power scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a 17-mile long particle smasher running under the Swiss-French border — went offline early Friday morning after a marten gnawed through a power cable, causing a short circuit. The furry little creature — adult males of the species weigh less than 4 pounds — met a more unfortunate end: it died.The beech marten, identified in a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) document by its French name, fouine, enter..

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• These dozing 'dragons' could change how we think about sleep

  

  Am Australian bearded dragon (Stephan Junek/Max Planck Institute for Brain Research via Reuters) The dragon's eyes twitch under its lids. An electronic monitor hooked up to its brain shows activity spiking across it. Somewhere inside its reptilian subconscious, a dream may be playing out — of enjoying a satisfying meal or relaxing on a sun-baked stone. The dragon is sleeping, scientists say. Not just resting, the way fish and wasps and even amoebas do, but really, truly sleeping, the way hu..

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• Driving a “Lunar” Rover, From the Space Station

  

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