Sally Ride during STS-7, NASA’s seventh Space Shuttle mission, in 1983 NASA SallyCristina CostantiniDisney+ (from 17 June) In 1983, Sally Ride made global headlines as the first US woman in space and the third woman after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya. A new documentary, Sally, directed by Cristina Costantini, sheds light on her extraordinary…
Using advanced computational modelling, a research team led by the University of Oxford, working in partnership with the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon, has achieved the first-ever real-time, three-dimensional simulations of how intense laser beams alter the ‘quantum vacuum’ — a state once assumed to be empty, but which quantum physics predicts…
A strange type of star could be powered by dark matter Artsiom P/Shutterstock Astronomers have found the strongest evidence yet for the existence of dark stars, a type of enormous star in the early universe that is partially powered by dark matter. If confirmed, these hypothesised stars could help explain why we see mysteriously large…
What do you do when food is running low and you are a tiny, millimetre-long worm? The answer, it turns out, is join up with thousands of your fellows to make a tentacle-like superorganism that can bridge gaps to nearby objects or grab hold of larger animals to carry you further afield. Biologists studying nematode…
The surface of the moon, as seen from orbit by Resilience before it crashed ispace SMBC x HAKUTO-R VENTURE MOON A Japanese space mission hoping to make history as the third ever private lunar landing has ended in failure, after ispace’s Resilience lander smashed into the moon at some point after 7.13pm UTC on 5…
