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Space Travel
Human spaceflight, commercial missions, astronaut life, station operations, space medicine, and the technologies making travel beyond Earth more accessible.
Space Travel
A funnel of pitch cut open in 1930 has produced only nine drops in 96 years, and scientists still expect the next one sometime in the 2020s
In 1930, a physicist at the University of Queensland cut open the stem of a funnel filled with pitch to show his students that some solids are actually very slow fluids. Ninety-six years later, only nine drops have fallen — and no human has ever witnessed one detach.
The Apollo 12 crew brought back Surveyor 3’s camera after 31 months on the Moon, and NASA reported finding live Streptococcus bacteria inside it, but later evidence pointed to contamination in Houston
How does a city-state of just over six million people meet up to 40 percent of its water needs by recycling what residents flush and drain away?
How did one half of a war-stripped Asian peninsula grow from 35 percent forest coile the other lost forests after the early 1990s?
In May 1952, Rosalind Franklin's graduate student Raymond Gosling exposed a single photographic plate to DNA fibres for 62 hours in a King's College basement, and the sharp black cross on Photo 51 showed the double helix before Watson and Crick had finished their cardboard model
Why did a crater lake smaller than one square mile suddenly release a suffocating cloud one night in 1986 that killed 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock within hours?
Astronauts returning from long stays on the International Space Station can come home up to 3 percent taller as their spines lengthen in microgravity, and the extra height disappears within a few months back on Earth
How does a moon in the outer solar system run an Earth-like weather cycle with rain, rivers, and seasonal lakes, using liquid methane instead of water at temperatures near minus 180 degrees Celsius?
In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from a summer holiday to find a stray mould had drifted onto a Staphylococcus plate in his cluttered London lab, and the clear ring of dead bacteria around it became the accidental beginning of the antibiotic era
What happened when a London doctor had the handle removed from one street pump in 1854, and how did the investigation reshape how cities track disease?
How did a captured wartime rocket, launched from a New Mexico desert in 1946, take the first photograph of Earth from space more than a decade before any satellite reached orbit?
