Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour took one last look at their spacecrafts heat shield Wednesday to hunt for any new damage sustained on its marathon flight to the International Space Station.
The survey, known at NASA as a late inspection, is a now-standard part of every shuttle flight to search for damage caused by micrometeorites or space junk.
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Space shuttle Endeavour’s astronauts are inspecting their ship to make sure it’s safe for Friday’s landing.
Endeavour and its crew of seven left the international space station Tuesday.
The survey of the wings and nose, being conducted Wednesday morning, is standard before a shuttle returns to Earth.
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A British court has ruled in favor of a group of young people who say pollution from a former steelworks contributed to their birth defects.
A High Court judge ruled Wednesday that Corby District Council was liable for the deformities in all but two of the cases.
Eighteen claimants aged between nine and 22 sued a local authority, claiming their mothers were exposed to what one expert called an “atmospheric soup of toxic materials” from the former British Steel plant at Corby in central England.
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The panel reviewing NASA’s future plans for human space flight is convening for a session in Alabama.
The session will open with a statement by Robert Lightfoot, who is acting director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. It will include a review of NASA’s Constellation program, the agency’s current framework for sending astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars.
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As a large star nears the end of its life it begins to shed mass at a tremendous rate.
Views from the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope in Chile reveal a vast plume of gas spewing off of Betelgeuse, the shoulder star in the Orion constellation. This behemoth star has about 20 times the mass of our sun, but is losing about one suns worth of mass every 10,000 to 100,000 years.
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Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum thats nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter.
The work is detailed in the journal Nature Physics.
Its an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie “Star Trek IV.”
To create the new, even more exotic stuff, a short pulse from a laser “knocked out” a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metals crystalline structure, the researchers explain.
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Missouri researchers have launched a new effort in their fight against worldwide hunger: bringing together a doctor who has long treated the malnourished with plant scientists working to improve the nutritional content of food.
Three internationally known organizations based in St. Louis the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, the Washington University School of Medicine and St.
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The United States and China pledged to work together on a raft of issues from climate change to free trade to Iran as they set the stage for an era of closer cooperation.
But even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the dialogue was more about ideas than specifics, with the two sides mostly agreeing to hold more talks on a broad swath of issues.
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Rickshaws and cars ploughed through waist-high water in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka on Tuesday as the city received its biggest rainfall in a single July day for 60 years.
“Its the highest single day of rain in July since 1949,” said Dhaka meteorologist Ayesha Khatun, adding that more downpours were forecast.
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Long before dinosaurs dominated the Earth, ancient relatives to mammals climbed forests to feed on leaves and live high above predators that prowled the land.
These findings shed light on the giant shifts in what animals dined on before the dawn of the dinosaurs.
The elongated fingers, opposable “thumb,” long curved claws and grasping tail of a small, huge-eyed plant-eating animal known as Suminia getmanovi demonstrate that this is the earliest known tree-climbing vertebrate, scientists now reveal.
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