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BEIJING, China (AFP) — Solar panels against an alien landscape, ramps and rods pointing at the Martian horizon — China’s first probe on the Red Planet has beamed back its first “selfies” after its history-making landing last week. The Zhurong rover was carried into the Martian atmosphere in a lander on Saturday, in the first ever successful probe landing by any country on its first Mars mission. Zhurong, named after a mythical Chinese fire god, […]
PARIS, France (AFP) — Sleeping six hours or less per night in your 50s and 60s is associated with an increased risk of dementia, according to a new study of nearly 8,000 British adults followed for more than 25 years. Scientists said that while the research, which was based on data from a long-running survey, could not prove cause and effect, it did draw a link between sleep and dementia as people age. The study, […]
by Marlowe HOOD PARIS, France (AFP) — Scientists have reported the discovery of a rare, medium-sized black hole that may help answer one of the more tantalising questions in astronomy: how do their supermassive counterparts come into being? There are two well-known sizes of black hole — at one end, so-called stellar-class ones which are typically three to ten times the mass of our Sun — and at the other, supermassive ones, found at the […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — The largest asteroid to pass by Earth this year will approach within some 1.25 million miles (two million kilometers) of our planet on March 21, NASA said Thursday. The US space agency said it will allow astronomers to get a rare close look at an asteroid. The asteroid, 2001 FO32, is estimated to be about 3,000 feet in diameter and was discovered 20 years ago, NASA said. “We know the […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — A prototype of a SpaceX rocket the company hopes will one day journey to Mars crashed in a fireball as it tried to land upright after a test flight Tuesday. It was the second such accident after the last prototype of Starship met a similar fate in December. “We had again another great flight,” said SpaceX announcer John Insprucker on an online broadcast. “We’ve just got to work on that […]
by Adrien MAROTTE ZADIE CAVE, Gabon (AFP) — The scene looks like something out of a science fiction movie, or maybe some dystopian TV series. Six men in yellow biohazard suits clamber in suffocating heat towards a cave in the heart of the Gabonese jungle. Their quest: to unlock new knowledge on how pathogens like coronavirus leap the species barrier to humans. In the cave is their goal — a colony of bats. “Our job […]
by Juliette COLLEN PARIS, France (AFP) — The solar system’s two biggest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, came within planetary kissing range in Monday’s evening sky, an intimacy that will not occur again until 2080. This “great conjunction”, as it is known to astronomers, occurred fortuitously on the winter solstice for those in the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of summer in the global south. The two planets were, in fact, more than 730 million kilometers […]
by Adrien MAROTTE Agence France-Presse ZADIE CAVES, Gabon (AFP) — The scene looks like something out of a science fiction movie, or maybe some dystopian TV series. Six men in yellow biohazard suits clamber in suffocating heat towards a cave in the heart of the Gabonese jungle. Their quest: to unlock new knowledge on how pathogens like coronavirus leap the species barrier to humans. In the cave is their goal — a colony of bats. […]
by Ludovic EHRET PINGTANG, China (AFP) — Nestled among the mountains in southwest China, the world’s largest radio telescope signals Beijing’s ambitions as a global centre for scientific research. The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) — the only significant instrument of its kind after the collapse of another telescope in Puerto Rico this month — is about to open its doors for foreign astronomers to use, hoping to attract the world’s top scientific talent. The […]
by Kelly MACNAMARA Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — For decades scientists have been trying to figure out how to swiftly predict the twisting, tangled shape of proteins — and from there unravel a greater understanding of the machinery of life itself. This week an Artificial Intelligence program created by Google sister firm DeepMind was shown to have virtually cracked the challenge, forecasting the way in which proteins contort into three dimensional structures in the […]
SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — Small, portable laser pointers could be used to guide lightning strikes, with a study suggesting the technology may prevent bolts from sparking wildfires, a researcher told AFP Thursday. A team of international scientists have shown storm clouds could be “short-circuited” by using a hollow laser — like a pipe of light — to deliver particles into the clouds and draw lightning strikes, research co-author Professor Andrey Miroshnichenko from the University of […]
WILMINGTON, United States (AFP) — President-elect Joe Biden vowed Saturday immediate action to contain the United States’ coronavirus crisis, signalling science would dominate the national response once Donald Trump leaves the White House. Biden’s pledge, in his first national address since defeating Trump, followed three days of record infections in the United States and came as the nation’s death toll surpassed 237,000. Europe’s second-wave woes also deepened, with Greece becoming the latest European nation […]
