science

NASA plans to launch three research rockets to analyze a rare space marvel that could collect crucial information. The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) rockets will launch April 8 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study how the total solar eclipse impacts the Earth’s upper atmosphere,NASA announced Monday. After next month’s, there won’t be another total solar …

Earth’s changing spin is threatening to toy with our sense of time, clocks and computerized society in an unprecedented way — but only for a second. For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. …

Seventh-grade student Henry Cohen bounced side to side in time to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” playing in teacher Nancy Morris’ classroom, swinging his arms open and closed across the planets pictured on his T-shirt. Henry and other classmates at Cleveland’s Riverside School were on their feet, dancing during a session of activities tied to April’s total solar eclipse. …

A staggering 22% of migratory animals are facing potential extinction, while some 44% are experiencing notable population decline, according to a “State of the World’s Migratory Species” report released by the U.N. last month. “This is the first-ever comprehensive assessment of migratory species,” Executive Director Inger Andersen of the U.N. Environment Programme said of the report, which FOX Weather reported …

A geomagnetic storm is expected to last through Monday, possibly disrupting radio communications but making for great aurora viewing. These high-frequency radio transmissions include aircrafts trying to communicate with distant traffic control towers. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado issued geomagnetic storm watches for Sunday and Monday as a “coronal mass ejection,” or CME, was headed for Earth. …

April’s total solar eclipse promises to be a scientific bonanza, thanks to new spacecraft and telescopes — and cosmic chance. The moon will be extra close to Earth, providing a long and intense period of darkness, and the sun should be more active with the potential for dramatic bursts of plasma. Then there’s totality’s densely populated corridor stretching from Mexico …

There definitely were no muppets during the Permian Period, but there was a Kermit – or at least a forerunner of modern amphibians that has been named after the celebrity frog. Scientists on Thursday described the fossilized skull of a creature called Kermitops gratus that lived in what is now Texas about 270 million years ago. It belongs to a …

When NASA sent its DART spacecraft to slam into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, the U.S. space agency demonstrated that it was possible to change a celestial object’s trajectory, if needed, to protect Earth. It turns out that this collision changed not only the asteroid’s path but its shape as well. The asteroid, which before the DART encounter looked like …

ATLANTA — There has never been a homicide in space. But Detective Zack Kowalske is conducting research to investigate the first murder in microgravity, not if — but when — it occurs. “Where humanity goes, so too will human behavior,” said Kowalske, a crime scene investigator (CSI) for the police department in Roswell, Georgia, a suburb north of Atlanta. “So, …