Jokes

After numerous attempts to communicate with the Phoenix Mars probe, NASA experts said that the craft is a victim of winter on Mars. The craft landed in the northern part of Mars on May 25, 2008 and send signals to Earth until November, when he installed the Martian winter. Any attempt to communicate with Phoenix [...]

Ball lightning is a rare circular light phenomenon occurring during thunderstorms. Scientists have been puzzled by the nature of these apparent fire balls for a long time. Now physicists at the University of Innsbruck have calculated that the magnetic field of long lightning strokes may produce the image of luminous shapes, also known as phosphenes, [...]

Using observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, astronomers have announced a robust detection of a vast reservoir of intergalactic gas about 400 million light years from Earth. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the “missing matter” in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas. [...]

The discovery of the Archaeopteryx feathers appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers say the sample contains “portions of the feathers are not merely impressions of long-decomposed organic material as was previously believed”. “Instead, they include fossilised fragments of actual feathers containing phosphorous and sulfur, elements that [...]

British scientists have found five common genetic factors linked to the risk of developing breast cancer, giving researchers a better understanding of its causes and clues for developing more treatments. Douglas Easton from Britain’s University of Cambridge led the largest genome-wide analysis of breast cancer patients to date, scanning the gene maps of 16,536 patients, [...]