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It was a picture-perfect launch, just before sunrise on a sandy coastline. The rocket, bright as a candle flame, climbed steadily, leaving a spindly trail of smoke that split the sky in half, with the sharp darkness of night on one side and the first pastel hues of daylight on the other. It carried a capsule, bound for the International Space Station, to the edge of space and let go.

The trouble started after that. The capsule, built for NASA by Boeing, was supposed to ignite its own engines to boost itself higher into orbit, where it would chase after the space station. But the engines didn’t start when they should have.

Engineers watched, unable to help from below, as the spacecraft became disoriented.

Smoke from fires in Australia is expected to make at least one "full circuit" around the globe and return to the skies over the country, scientists from NASA have warned.

Studying smoke plumes from late December, the space agency said that the smoke had traveled "halfway across Earth" and affected air quality in other countries. Australia is being ravaged by the worst wildfires seen in decades, with large swaths of the country devastated since the fire season began in late July.

At least 28 people have died nationwide, and in the state of New South Wales (NSW) alone, more than 3,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged. State and federal authorities are struggling to contain the massive blazes.

NASA has found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.

The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

the test in Mississippi was cut short after a malfunction caused an automatic abort.

"We did get an MCF on engine four," a control room member said less than a minute into the test fire, using an initialism that stands for "major component malfunction."

The test was meant to last eight minutes – the full duration needed for the booster during its Artemis program liftoff – but only ran less than two minutes.

Earth endured its second-hottest year on record in 2019, NASA and NOAA scientists announced Wednesday, capping a decade they say was the warmest in recorded history.

The annual global climate assessment offers more evidence that the dangerous warming unleashed mostly by humans' burning of fossil fuels is continuing virtually unabated.

"This shows that what's happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in announcing the report.

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

On Wednesday, the scientists at NASA kind of freaked out. They announced the discovery of some seemingly Earth-like planets outside of our solar system, a group of rocky globes they're calling 'TRAPPIST-1.'

To be completely blunt, the most exiting thing for actual scientists is that these planets are close enough that we're actually going to be able to study them – particularly when the James Webb Space Telescope launches (October 2018.) When that launches, it will have a real shot at actually taking a look at the atmospheres of these planets – or if they have atmospheres at all. So it's like a promise of future excitement

The closer the system is to our solar system – the more the star is like the Sun and the planet is like the Earth, the more likely we are to understand what we're looking at. That's what makes it exciting.

Our solar system is spread out by comparison. This cramped little system finds each planet’s orbit closer to their star, TRAPPIST-1, than Mercury is to ours. Of all the planets discovered, TRAPPIST-1f is the most likely to sustain life, NASA scientists say. Those closer planets may be too hot to contain liquid water, while those beyond may be too cold.

Another interesting consideration, this star, since it burns so slowly, will likely outlive ours by a trillion years. So if the Earth is vanquished and the situation is right, we may find a new Eden on TRAPPIST-1f.

In a rare bipartisan moment US lawmakers opened up the possibility of mining on other worlds despite an international treaty barring sovereign claims in space

The US Senate passed the Space Act of 2015 this week, sending its revisions of the bill back to the House for an expected approval, after which it would land on the president’s desk. The bill has a slew of provisions to encourage commercial companies that want to explore space and exploit its resources, granting “asteroid resource” and “space resource” rights to US citizens who managed to acquire the resource themselves.

lawmakers defined “space resource” as “an abiotic resource in situ in outer space” that would include water and minerals but not life.

After billions of dollars and a decade of work, NASA’s plans to send astronauts back to the moon had a new setback on Saturday. A planned eight-minute test firing of the four engines of a new mega rocket needed for the moon missions came to an abrupt end after only about a minute.

NASA officials, however, said that it was too early to predict delays, if any. “I don’t think at this point that we have enough information to know,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference after the test. “It depends what the anomaly was and how challenging it’s going to be to fix it.”

The rocket, known as the Space Launch System, has yet to travel to space, and Saturday’s test was intended to be a key milestone. For the first time, the four engines on the booster stage were set to be fired for about eight minutes, simulating what they would do during an actual launch.

His comments come as the pope, who earned a master's degree in chemistry before turning to the priesthood, becomes increasingly vocal about climate change. Pope Francis is preparing a groundbreaking encyclical to be released in the coming weeks that's expected to make the case that taking action to fight climate change is a moral and religious imperative.

Santorum has a history of rejecting established science. He denies that climate change is man-made and has dismissed global warming as a "hoax" despite the fact that 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that "climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities," according to NASA.

“The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality,” Santorum said. "When we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, I think the church is not as forceful and credible."

artificial-intelligence software.

Google says it has proof that a controversial machine it bought in 2013 really can use quantum physics to work through a type of math that’s crucial to artificial intelligence much faster than a conventional computer.

“It is a truly disruptive technology that could change how we do everything,” said Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

We may be captivated by the thought of organisms on another planet, but we seem to have lost interest in our own. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has been excising the waymarks of the living world. Adders, blackberries, bluebells, conkers, holly, magpies, minnows, otters, primroses, thrushes, weasels and wrens are now surplus to requirements.

past four decades, the world has lost 50% of its vertebrate wildlife. But across the latter half of this period, there has been a steep decline in media coverage

as many news stories broadcast by the BBC and ITV about Madeleine McCann (who went missing in 2007) as there were about the entire range of environmental issues.

the value of being aware of our ignorance has been a recurring theme in Western thought: René Descartes said it’s necessary to doubt all things to build a solid foundation for science; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, reflecting on the limits of language, said that “the difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.”

Sometimes, when it appears that someone is expressing doubt, what he is really doing is recommending a course of action. For example, if I tell you that I don’t know whether there is milk in the fridge, I’m not exhibiting philosophical wisdom — I’m simply recommending that you check the fridge before you go shopping.

According to NASA, at least 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists think that “climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely caused by human activities.”

she cried, “They took my f***ing phone!” Attempting to engage Kelly in conversation, I asked her what she liked about her phone and social media. “They make me happy,” she replied.

Even though they were loving and involved parents, Kelly’s mom couldn’t help feeling that they’d failed their daughter and must have done something terribly wrong that led to her problems.

My practice as a child and adolescent psychologist is filled with families like Kelly’s. These parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart.

For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise—and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance—scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere.

“Now we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,

“When you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,” says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA’s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. “It’s irreplaceable data.”

if all of those bad presentations really led to broad societal ills, the proof is hard to find.

Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether the software really influences our ability to process information. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored multiple reviews synthesizing this literature. On the whole, he told me, the research suggests that Tufte was partly right, partly wrong. PowerPoint doesn’t seem to make us stupid—there is no evidence of lower information retention or generalized cognitive decline, for example, among those who use it—but it does impose a set of assumptions about how information ought to be conveyed: loosely, in bullet points, and delivered by presenters to an audience of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the physical environment for the slide-deck age, Kernbach said: Seminar tables, once configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.

When I spoke with Kernbach, he was preparing for a talk on different methods of visual thinking to a group of employees at a large governmental organization. He said he planned to use a flip chart, draw on blank slides like a white board, and perhaps even have audience members do some drawing of their own. But he was also gearing up to use regular old PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he told me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his audience. The organization was NASA.