Science, Space, & Robotics

SpaceX has confirmed that Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, has exploded on the launch pad during a routine test.

In preparation for its 10th test flight, SpaceX's newest Starship model has experienced a catastrophic failure, resulting in it exploding into a fireball on the launch pad at its Starbase site in South Texas on Wednesday night, June 18. The explosion occurred at about 11 pm, and SpaceX has confirmed that no personnel were injured during the event and everyone has been accounted for. Additionally, the Elon Musk-led company is now working to "safe the test site and immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials."

Moreover, residents living in the surrounding area are at no risk, according to SpaceX, with the company requesting that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while staff continue to make the area safe. So, what happened?

The James Webb Space Telescope has pointed its extremely powerful instruments at a patch of sky that measures about three times as much space as the moon takes up when viewed from Earth. Webb spent 255 hours looking at this region, and the results are a stunningly detailed map of the universe.

This specific region of space is called the COSMOS field and doesn't contain many stars, gas clouds, or other celestial objects that can impede the view of observers. The COSMOS field is a proverbial window into the deep universe, hence researchers wanting Webb, the world's most powerful space telescope, to peer into that region to gather valuable data.

What Webb found was 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all of cosmic time, meaning the galaxies observed, or the light produced from these galaxies, date back to around the beginning of the universe, 13.5 billion years ago. NASA estimates the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.

Amazon is already working on humanoid robots that might eventually be used to deliver products to customers.

According to a report by The Information, the retail giant is already preparing to test these robots, according to an anonymous source familiar with Amazon's plans.

That testing involves an indoor obstacle course known as the 'humanoid park' where the robots can be let loose, and apparently this facility is nearly complete now, and testing will soon begin.

SpaceX has conducted its ninth test flight for Starship, the world's most powerful rocket, and while the flight ended in fiery explosions, the flight was deemed a major milestone.

The Elon Musk-led space-faring company launched Starship on its ninth test flight at 6:36 p.m. CT on Tuesday, May 27, marking the first time that a Super Heavy booster has been reused for a launch, with the first time this particular booster was used being in Flight 7. SpaceX wrote on X that Flight 9 was intended to push Super Heavy to "intentionally push Super Heavy to the limits," in order to gain real-world data to improve the next-generation booster. So, what happened to Super Heavy and the upper stage, Ship?

Super Heavy performed adequately, demonstrating its ability to fly at a higher angle of attack during its descent back to Earth. Super Heavy separated from Starship correctly, and upon its re-entry back to its designated splashdown area within the Gulf of America, Super Heavy relit its 13 center and middle ring Raptor engines. Unfortunately, the booster was lost just after the landing burn began, resulting in an unscheduled disassembly, or boom, only 6 minutes and 20 seconds after launch.

SpaceX has announced that next Tuesday, the world's most powerful rocket will take to the skies once again in an attempt to recover the Ship part of the rocket, a feat that has never been achieved.

That rocket is Starship, and when the 400-foot-tall rocket takes to the skies next Tuesday, it will mark the ninth launch of the megarocket. SpaceX's goal for this launch is to fly the upper stage or Ship part of the rocket halfway around Earth and land it in the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, this has never been achieved by SpaceX as the upper stage always burns up upon reentry into the atmosphere.

Elon Musk elaborated on this problem during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast. He explained that the problem is the heat shield not being sufficient and that recovering the upper stage so engineers can examine it may provide the answers to designing an appropriate heat shield that prevents the stages' destruction. Until then, SpaceX engineers just have to try different designs and configurations of the heat shield tiles and implement what data they can acquire throughout the re-entry process.

Mention night vision and this will likely conjure up images of big, clunky goggles of some kind, but scientists have just developed a far more elegant solution in the form of contact lenses that allow people to see in the dark using infrared light.

This is a creation of the University of Science and Technology of China, where experiments with nanoparticles led to the development of the technology.

The contact lenses in question are made with nanoparticles which absorb infrared light, and as Phys.org, which spotted this invention, points out, specifically this is near-infrared light (NIR), only just beyond the spectrum of what people can already see.

It took a dual-CPU compute server running nonstop for seven and a half months. Inside was a high-performance storage cluster with 2.2 petabytes (PB) of storage capacity, running intensive workloads up to 100+ GB/s. The storage comprised KIOXIA's 30.72 TB CM Series and 15.36 TB CD Series PCIe NVMe SSDs configured in a NAS (network attached storage) environment.

The goal? Calculate the most accurate value of the infinite mathematical constant called Pi. This new 300 trillion accurate value for Pi has set a new Guinness World Record, smashing through the previous record of 64 trillion digits and even surpassing community-recognized records of 100 and 202 trillion digits by up to 50%.

The new record and impressive achievement have been documented on Linus Tech Tips' YouTube channel, which you can watch above.

Researchers from Japan's University of Toho, along with NASA scientists, have used the power of supercomputers to discover exactly when life on Earth will be wiped out.

A study published in Nature Geoscience details the process of Earth eventually being suffocated in continuous increases in heat from the Sun, pushing the climate on the surface of our planet beyond what is sustainable for life to exist. Using supercomputers, the NASA scientists, along with researchers from the University of Tokyo, plugged in climate change and solar radiation models to map out how long it would take for the Sun to push Earth to the brink of extinction.

According to the results, Earth being inhabitable won't happen overnight; it will actually be a very slow and gradual process that will occur over millions of years, with the number that the researchers landed on for when life on planet Earth is no longer possible - year 1,000,002,021. Don't worry, it's not your lifetime, but if humans are still around in 1 billion years, this will be something they have to contend with as it's an inevitability due to the Sun itself having a lifespan. When the run reaches its end of life, it will expand dramatically, swallowing whatever is near it, which could possibly be Earth.

Skype has officially shut down after being one of the primary services people used to connect with each other for a staggering 23 years.

While Skype wasn't at the forefront of video calling services for those 23 years, it absolutely led the charge at the beginning of the rise of video calling. Skype was originally founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who created the service to offer free phone calls over the internet, which later turned into video calls and a private messaging service.

Leading the charge of video calling over the internet, Skype had approximately 300 million users at one point, attracting eBay as a buyer in 2005, which purchased the company for $2.6 billion. Skype was later sold to a group of investors in 2009, and then to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. Unfortunately for the legacy video calling service, popularity began to dwindle as more competition arose, and the final nail in the coffin was the beginning of the pandemic, when millions of people around the world flocked to services such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Slack, and Microsoft's own Teams for communication.

A team of students has resurrected an ancient rice recipe through the use of Han-era techniques and modern technology.

Eleven students have taken an ancient rice recipe that was found on a bamboo slip inside the tomb of Wu Yang, a military general and politician who lived in the county of Hunan, and applied modern technology along with Han-era cooking techniques to resurrect the ancient food. The students from Hunan University, along with China Agricultural University in Beijing, set out to recreate the food by correctly interpreting the ancient texts and using tools that are as close to what was used by people when the recipe was written.

The 2,000-year-old recipe was scattered among several bamboo slips, and unfortunately fragmented. Moreover the recipe didn't include important factors such as cooking times, sparking an investigation into how rice cooking has changed over the course of 2,000 years.

NASA has announced that its new space observatory has completed its calibration phase and has begun mapping the entire night sky in 3D.

The space agency has explained in a new blog post that the SPHEREx observatory, which was launched on March 11, has recently completed its six-week-long calibration and checkout phase and has now begun snapping images of the entire night sky. NASA emphasizes this space observatory won't be taking photos of portions of the night sky; it will be the entire sky, with the goal of mapping the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to "answer some big questions about the universe."

NASA says that operations for SPHEREx began on May 1, which involves the observatory taking approximately 3,600 images per day for the next two years. SPHEREx is positioned in Earth's orbit and throughout its planned 25 months of observations it will complete more than 11,000 orbits of Earth, circling the planet we call home about 14 and a half times per day. The hundreds of thousands of images SPHEREx will capture over its two-year period will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps.

Researchers from Peking University have claimed to have created a silicon-free transistor that is pegged to improve processor speed and efficiency significantly.

The creation is detailed in a new study published in Nature Materials that explains a next-generation chip architecture that could replace traditional silicon-based microprocessors as we know them. The new design involves a two-dimensional material called bismuth oxyselenide, which the study explains is not only thinner and more flexible than silicon, but also enables faster electron movement along with more control over electrical currents. According to the study, the new transistor is able to completely wrap the gate around every side of the source, providing complete coverage.

Notably, traditional transistor designs are only able to cover three sides of the source, and since the new design is able to wrap the gate around the entire source, there is less energy loss and more current control, which leads designers to have faster and more efficient performance. The researchers behind the paper state that the new silicon-free transistor has the potential to be 40% faster than top silicon-based chips from companies such as Intel, while also using 10% less energy.

A man who was bitten more than 200 times by dangerous venomous snakes has helped produce the most potent anti-venom ever made.

Tim Friede, a Wisconsin man, has been injecting himself with snake venom for 18 years, racking up hundreds of injections and snake bites in his personal quest to attempt to become immune to the poisonous snakes he was keeping as pets.

Unfortunately for Friede, the human body's immunity to venomous pathogens is quite short-lived, with the developed antibodies that protect the body from harmful pathogens depleting after just a few short weeks. Due to this fact, Friede had to keep injecting himself with snake venom to maintain a healthy dose of immunity-driving antibodies.

A startup co-founded by OpenAI CEO and founder Sam Altman has launched its eyeball-scanning orbs in the United States.

The startup behind the odd-looking orbs is called Tools for Humanity, and it's pioneering the World Human Verification project, which it unveiled on Wednesday. The idea behind the project is to produce a device called an Orb that is able to scan the irises of an individual and assign a verifiable identification profile, putting that identification profile on the blockchain to verify that you are, in fact, human. Yes, that is right, Sam Altman's co-founded startup wants to verify your humanity with a device. But why?

The use is quite practical, as World intends to create digital "proof of human" tools which it believes will be useful in the future, since AI will eventually become so sophisticated it will be difficult to distinguish humans from AI agents on the internet. The idea is that World will create a WorldID with the gathered unique IrisCode from an individual, and with that, users will be able to log in to various platforms and services, including Minecraft and Reddit.

The oldest living full-time NASA astronaut, Don Pettit, has sat down for an interview following his recent 220-day stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where he revealed an interesting effect of prolonged space residency.

Pettit spoke to reporters a week after touching back down on Earth on April 20, his 70th birthday, which is probably one of the most unique birthday presents a human can receive - plummeting back down to the surface of your home planet. Pettit has now racked up 590 days aboard the ISS, and reporters asked him about the impact space has on the body at the age of 70.

Pettit said that after prolonged exposure to the weightlessness of space, coming back down to Earth's gravity has always posed a "significant challenge," with the veteran NASA astronaut acknowledging he didn't look great in the photos/videos of him being carried away from the Soyuz spacecraft on April 20.

Two members of Elon Musk's DOGE team were reportedly granted access to highly classified information about the United States government's nuclear weapon stockpile despite having zero experience with handling classified information.

A new NPR report has revealed that 23-year-old former SpaceX intern Luke Farritor and venture capitalist Adam Ramada were granted access to the government's nuclear secrets, with both of the DOGE members having accounts on nuclear networks for at least two weeks. Notably, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy (DOE) initially denied that Farritor and Ramada had access to the network, with the DOE writing, "This reporting is false. No DOGE personnel have accessed these NNSA systems."

However, the DOE released an update on Monday where it said accounts for both of the DOGE members were created on the network, but never used. "DOE is able to confirm that these accounts in question were never activated and have never been accessed," the email statement read. The NPR article cites two sources who declined to be identified, as they are unable to speak about the matter publicly. The publication notes that its sources have access to the same network to which Farritor and Ramada were connected.

A team of researchers discovered an unseen color that they claim hasn't been seen by any human that has ever existed before.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances details research conducted by scientists in California who explained how they stimulated specific cells within the retinas of study participants to produce a color that is impossible to see naturally. The new color has been deemed "olo," and the above image is what the researchers say is the closest to what olo looks like, but apparently, the image pales in comparison to the actual color. Moreover, study coauthor Austin Roodrda said, "There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor."

The International Space Station (ISS) provides a unique vantage point for observing Earth, with the floating laboratory being home to not only several astronauts conducting impressive experiments in microgravity, but also a few cameras pointed directly at the surface of Earth.

One of these cameras captured something that caught the attention of Charles Black, the founder of the Earth and space livestreaming company Sen, which hosts three cameras aboard the ISS. These cameras are pointed straight down at Earth, with one's frame covering approximately 155 by 93 miles. The 4K video captured what was described as "mysterious writing etched into the sand," per Sen. From the perspective of the ISS, what was captured appeared to be letters carved into the ground of Tunisia.

These "letters" contrasted bleakly with the barren desert plains of the region, and according to Sen, the company doesn't always reveal the origin of what it's determined to be an interesting capture by its ISS cameras. The purpose of not revealing the origin is that the company wants the "audience to be engaged" by "promoting debate, discussion, and interest." The company labeled the location and let the viewers decide what they were looking at. Take a guess at what caused these markings and check if your answer aligns with the one below.

Researchers have discovered new evidence for signs of life existing beyond our solar system thanks to the intense power of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the world's most powerful space telescope.

The discovery was detailed in a new paper published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters and penned by an international team of researchers led by University of Cambridge astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan. According to the paper, Webb scanned the atmosphere of the exoplanet known as K2-18b with its infrared instruments, and the data it gathered indicate the presence of the molecule dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which, as far as its existence on Earth, is only produced by living organisms.

Colossal Biosciences made headlines yesterday when it announced the resurrection of the dire wolf, a species of wolf that hasn't roamed Earth for more than 10,000 years.

The resurrection of the dire wolf species occurred on October 1, 2024, when three dire wolves were born into captivity. How was this scientific achievement made? Researchers at Colossal used ancient dire wolf DNA of the species and combined it with the genes of a grey wolf, which is the closest living ancestor of the dire wolf. The result is a hybrid of both species that has an extremely similar appearance and structure to its extinct ancestor. However, researchers are questioning the labeling of this new species and whether or not its accurate to say the dire wolf has been de-extincted.

The problems with these claims. Grey wolves and dire wolves were initially thought to be closely related due to their physical characteristics, but as New Scientist reports, a 2021 study of their ancient DNA found they last shared a common ancestor around 6 million years ago. In fact, animals like jackals, African wild dogs, and dholes are genetically closer to grey wolves than dire wolves are - even though dire wolves look more like grey wolves.