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07 Aug 2018 Taken from the August 2018 issue of Physics World In the developing world it’s difficult to get and maintain the hi-tech equipment we associate with modern laboratories. But could open-science hardware provide a lifeline? Rachel Brazilinvestigates Walk into any modern physics laboratory and you’ll see all kinds of hi-tech instruments. There are spectrometers, microscopes, […]

We have sent probes zooming throughout our local solar system. There have been human landings on the moon, asteroid touchdowns, and planetary flybys aplenty. Voyager 1 is still zooming off into the deep stretch of interstellar space beaming us back information until the mid-2020s. We’ve been to a lot of places in such a relatively

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk has a vision for colonising Mars, based on a big rocket, nuclear explosions and an infrastructure to transport millions of people there. This was seen as highly ambitious but technically challengingin several

Astronomers have detected yet another mysterious and powerful fast radio burst hitting Earth from an unknown source in space. If that’s not strange enough, this particular fast radio burst is incredibly low, in the 580 megahertz frequency range – nearly 200 MHz lower than any other fast radio burst we’ve picked up on before. If

Nearing the end of its life, the spectacularly successful mission is still churning out new observations The Kepler space telescope isn’t dead yet. Kepler, which has discovered about 70 percent of the 3,800 known exoplanets to date, woke up from a four-week hibernation yesterday (Aug. 2) and has begun beaming data home, just as planned, NASA officials announced today

In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, named Cohl Furey rented a car and drove six hours south to Pennsylvania State University, eager to talk to a physics professor there named Murat Günaydin. Furey had figured out how to build on a finding of Günaydin’s from 40 years earlier — a largely forgotten result

Amid rising concerns over the effects of global warming, a group of scientists has claimed that the Earth could in a little over a decade be hit by a “mini ice age” that would freeze major rivers. The startling prediction is based on a mathematical model of the Sun’s magnetic energy which also suggests that

Fiery chunks of rock are constantly bombarding the planetary bodies of our solar system, leaving behind long-lasting scars. These gouges, in the form of craters, can be used to learn about the history of our little nook in the vast universe, prompting scientists to feverishly study their features. Yet one pattern commonly found around craters