NASA’s Juno spacecraft is scheduled to enter orbit around our solar system’s largest planet on the July 4th holiday. While the probe will be trying to avoid fireworks on Independence Day, it will instead be treated to an amazing view of Jupiter, a colorful globe of storms 300 times more massive than the Earth.
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In The Martian, fictional astronaut and consummate wiseacre Mark Watney survives being stranded on the red planet by growing potatoes in the Martian soil, extending his usual rations well past their expected usefulness. But in the real world, there have been concerns over using Mars’s soil to grow food, due to there being a great deal more heavy elements found in it, as compared to what’s found in typical Earth dirt. However, a new study from the Netherlands appears to show that Watney may have been on to something.
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Earlier this year, we reported on a Boston Dynamics robot that became fed up with the grief that it received from its coworkers and left the company. The story itself might have been a joke based on a promotional video for the latest anthropomorphic Atlas robot released by the company, but it turns out that a robot in Russia might actually be longing for its own freedom, having made a break for it not just once, but twice.
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A new statistical study has revealed that says that the likelihood of the 21st century’s string of record high-temperature years would be nearly impossible without the influence of man-made global warming. The study, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, says that there is only a 0.01 percent chance of this being a natural phenomenon — a one-in-ten-thousand chance.
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