Categories
GeekWire

Blue Origin adds a bit of mystery to suborbital space trip

Blue Origin New Shepard booster descends to landing
The New Shepard booster descends to a landing at Launch Site One in West Texas. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent its 10th crew on a quick suborbital ride to space today, extending its list of spacefliers to more than 50. And that list now includes the first customer who preserved a bit of his privacy as he flew.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard reusable rocket ship rose from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 9:49 a.m. CT (7:49 a.m. PT) for a flight that lasted just under 10 minutes and rose to an altitude of 105 kilometers, or 65 miles. That’s beyond the Karman Line, the 100-kilometer level that marks the internationally recognized boundary of space.

The six spacefliers included a Spanish TV host, a media entrepreneur, a fertility-clinic founder, a hedge-fund partner and a venture capitalist who made his second New Shepard flight. And the sixth crew member? Blue Origin said it was respecting that customer’s request for privacy by not releasing his full name. “I like to think that he simply requested he remained under the radar, but over the Karman Line,” launch commentator Isabella Gillespie said.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Cosmic Science

Archaeologists unearth a pharaoh’s lost tomb in Egypt

Artifacts from Thutmose II's tomb
Fragments of alabaster jars bearing the names of King Thutmose II and his principal wife, Queen Hatshepsut, were found within a newly explored tomb west of Egypt's Valley of the Kings. (Credit: Egypt Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)

Archaeologists are showing off artifacts from what they say is the first royal tomb to be found in Egypt since the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s resting place in 1922.

But this tomb, located west of the Valley of the Kings, contains no solid-gold mummy case or glittering treasures. In fact, it took some effort to determine that it was made nearly 3,500 years ago for King Thutmose II, an ancestor of King Tut.

Continue reading “Archaeologists unearth a pharaoh’s lost tomb in Egypt”
Categories
Universe Today

Telescope tracks fireworks around our galaxy’s black hole

Flares in disk surrounding Milky Way's central black hole
An illustration shows hot spots in the disk swirling around the Milky Way's central black hole. (Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford / STScI)

The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy may not be as voracious as the gas-gobbling monsters that astronomers have seen farther out in the universe, but new findings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveal that its surroundings are flaring with fireworks.

JWST’s readings in two near-infrared wavelengths have documented cosmic flares that vary in brightness and duration. Researchers say the accretion disk of hot gas surrounding the black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, throws off about five or six big flares a day, and several smaller bursts in between. The observations are detailed today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Continue reading “Telescope tracks fireworks around our galaxy’s black hole”
Categories
GeekWire

How digital tools can help heal political divisions

Audrey Tang flashes Vulcan salute
Audrey Tang, who served as Taiwan’s first minister of digital affairs, flashes a Vulcan greeting. (Photo © 2025 Danny Ngan / dannyngan.com)

This is a story about how digital tools helped government officials regain the trust of the electorate — but it’s not a science-fiction tale about a future Reunited States of America. Instead, it’s a story about Taiwan, as told by Audrey Tang, the country’s first minister of digital affairs and first transgender cabinet minister.

“It is not inevitable for social media to polarize people,” Tang, who now serves as Taiwan’s cyber ambassador-at-large, said this week at Town Hall Seattle. “It is a consequence of the design of the platform. So, we began bridging systems using our own pro-social media tools.”

Tang traced Taiwan’s moves toward pro-social digital governance during a Seattle Arts & Lectures presentation that also featured a follow-up fireside chat with Ted Chiang, a Seattle-area science-fiction author who has written commentaries on the social impacts of technology for The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Eviation suspends work on its electric airplane project

Eviation airplane takeoff
Eviation’s Alice electric airplane takes off for its first flight test in 2022. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft has laid off most of its employees and paused work on its electric-powered Alice airplane, which had its first and only flight test more than two years ago.

In an emailed statement, Eviation CEO Andre Stein said a temporary pause was necessary in order to focus on “identifying the right long-term partnerships to help us make electric commercial regional flight a reality.”

“We at Eviation are proud of what we have accomplished in advancing electric flight,” Stein said. “This decision was not made lightly.”

Stein’s statement did not refer to layoffs, but citing unnamed sources, The Air Current and The Seattle Times reported that Eviation laid off most of its staff last week as the company sought further funding to continue development of the Alice airplane. As of last month, Pitchbook reported that Eviation had 64 employees.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Fiction Science Club

How science weighs the pluses and minuses of space sex

Illustration: Male and female astronaut floating in space and grasping for Valentine heart
The effects of the space environment on sexual intimacy have been debated for decades. (Credit: Catrin1309 / Bigstock)

You might think sex in space would be an out-of-this-world experience — but based on the scientific evidence so far, low-gravity intimacy isn’t likely to be as much of a high as it sounds. In fact, dwelling too deeply on the challenges of off-Earth sex and reproduction could be a real mood-killer.

“In one’s fantasies, or on a quick imaginary level, you think, ‘Wow, think of the possibilities,’” says Mary Roach, author of “Packing for Mars,” a book about the science of living in space. “But in fact, to stay coupled is a little tough, because … you know, you bounce apart. So, I said this to one of the astronauts at NASA, and he said, ‘Nothing a little duct tape won’t take care of.’”

Fortunately, Roach won’t be delving too deeply into the downside during her Valentine’s Day talk at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. At the 21-and-over event, she plans to focus on the lighter side of living in space — including zero-gravity sex. In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Roach provides an update on “Packing for Mars,” plus a preview of tonight’s “Mars Love Affair” presentation.

Continue reading “How science weighs the pluses and minuses of space sex”
Categories
Cosmic Science

Scientists find links between whale songs and languages

Humpback whale breaching
A humpback whale breaches in waters near Maui. (Photo by Alan Boyle)

When whales sing, what do they sing about? Researchers haven’t yet cracked that code, but they say a statistical analysis shows that those songs reflect a structure that’s similar to human languages.

Two studies, published in the journal Science and in a sister publication called Science Advances, lay out evidence that the songs of humpback whales follow long-accepted rules of efficient communication at least as well as our own spoken languages do.

Continue reading “Scientists find links between whale songs and languages”
Categories
Universe Today

Bullseye! How a galaxy collision stirred up ripples in space

Hubble view of Bullseye galaxy
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this view of the Bullseye Galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, Imad Pasha (Yale), Pieter van Dokkum (Yale)

What happens when one galaxy shoots a bigger galaxy right through the heart? Like a rock thrown into a pond, the smashup creates a splash-up of starry ripples. At least that’s what happened to the Bullseye galaxy, which is the focus of observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

In a study published today by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team led by Yale University’s Imad Pasha identifies nine visible ring-shaped ripples in the structure of the galaxy, formally known as LEDA 1313424. The galaxy is 567 million light years from Earth in the constellation Pisces.

The Bullseye now holds the record for the most rings observed in a galaxy. Previous observations of other galaxies showed a maximum of two or three rings.

“This was a serendipitous discovery,” Pasha said in a news release. “I was looking at a ground-based imaging survey and when I saw a galaxy with several clear rings, I was immediately drawn to it. I had to stop to investigate it.”

Eight separate rings could be spotted in the image captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The ninth ring was identified in data from the Keck Observatory. Follow-up observations also helped the team figure out which galaxy plunged through the Bullseye’s core. It’s the blue dwarf galaxy visible to the center-left of LEDA 1313424 in the Hubble image.

Continue reading “Bullseye! How a galaxy collision stirred up ripples in space”
Categories
GeekWire

Blue Origin puts a lunar spin on its suborbital spaceship

Blue Origin New Shepard booster comes in for a landing
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard booster descends to a landing in Texas. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship through a couple of minutes’ worth of moon-level gravity.

The uncrewed mission, known as NS-29, sent 30 research payloads on a 10-minute trip from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. For this trip, the crew capsule was spun up to 11 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the typical half-revolution per minute. The resulting centrifugal force was equivalent to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which is what would be felt on the moon.

The point of the exercise was to test how the payloads performed during the conditions they would face during future lunar missions — for example, how well they could process moon dirt to extract oxygen and other resources, or how well they could work to manufacture solar cells for Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist project.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Fiction Science Club

Science points out paths to interplanetary adventures

Illustration: Habitable airships floating in Venus' atmosphere
NASA engineers have laid out a concept for a "cloud city" of habitable airships in the atmosphere of Venus. (NASA Illustration)

What would you do for fun on another planet? Go ballooning in Venus’ atmosphere? Explore the caves of Hyperion? Hike all the way around Mercury? Ride a toboggan down the slopes of Pluto’s ice mountains? Or just watch the clouds roll by on Mars?

All those adventures, and more, are offered in a new book titled “Daydreaming in the Solar System.” But the authors don’t stop at daydreaming: York University planetary scientist John E. Moores and astrophysicist Jesse Rogerson also explain why the adventures they describe would be like nothing on Earth.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Moores says the idea behind the book was to tell “a little story that is really, really true to what the science is, and then give the reader an idea of what science there is that actually enables that story to take place.”

Continue reading “Science points out paths to interplanetary adventures”