Science Faction – ScienceFiction.com

Science Faction: This Week’s Coolest Science News (2021 Week 3)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 16:15:54 +0000

Welcome to Sci-Friday! Every week, we’ll help you head into the weekend by collecting some links from the best real-life science news that happened throughout the week, so you can mix a little reality into your fantasy. The International Space Station Captures Footage of Rare Upside-Down “Blue Jet” Lightning Most of us have been outside at some point in our lives and seen a lightning strike; it’s a certain kind of exhilaration to see the super-charged electricity come down from the clouds and strike the air and ground in a crackle of tendrils. But did you know there is a super-rare kind of blue lightning that shoots up from the clouds into the stratosphere? “Blue jets” are exceedingly rare, and that rarity has made the phenomenon incredibly hard to study – but scientists have recently caught a break, as the International Space Station captured a blue jet on their sensors last year. The unique “upside down lightning” was over 22 miles in length and occurred in only a 10-microsecond flash. Electric! (via Science News) Large Collections of Items from the Bronze Age May Have Served a Very Specific (and Modern-Sounding) Purpose The further we look back into history, the […]

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Science Faction: This Week’s Coolest Science News (2020 Week 45)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 18:12:32 +0000

Welcome to Sci-Friday! Every week, we’ll help you head into the weekend by collecting some links from the best real-life science news that happened throughout the week, so you can mix a little reality into your fantasy. 43 Years Later, Voyager 2 is in Deep Space and Still Answering NASA’s Calls If you get honked off when your phone that’s only a year old slows down and maybe even some of its basic functions stops working, then you’re really going to be frustrated with this story about one of the hardest-working pieces of technology ever made. Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 space probe was designed to study the solar system during its initial fly-through, and then head on out to deep space to keep relaying information as long as it could. Its course has taken it so far askew of Earth’s plane that only one antenna on the planet can still communicate with it; after 8 months of planned maintenance on the antenna, it came back online recently and picked up chatting with the deep-space probe right where it left off earlier this year. (via Ars Technica) Ginormous Spider Thought Extinct Spotted in England for the First Time […]

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Science Faction: This Week’s Coolest Science News (2020 Week 44)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:31:41 +0000

Welcome to Sci-Friday! Every week, we’ll help you head into the weekend by collecting some links from the best real-life science news that happened throughout the week, so you can mix a little reality into your fantasy. Multiple Studies Confirm There is Water on the Moon Well, this is certainly where reality meets a long-time science fiction premise in a head-on collision! The scientific journal Nature Astronomy has published not one but two different studies that found evidence of water molecules and likely water ice on the shadowed side of the Moon. (from The Washington Post) A Mind-Bogglingly Tiny 3D-Printed USS Voyager That Moves Under its Own Power Okay, this is just downright geeky cool – a team at Leiden University in The Netherlands have 3D-printed the smallest microscopic self-propelled objects ever, and one of the objects they created was the USS Voyager (well, an unmarked Intrepid-class starship, anyhow). With the ability to move provided by chemical reaction, the starship measures in at 15 micrometers, so small that it could remain comfortably balanced on a single piece of human hair. (from PCGamer) Escaped Cloned Female Mutant Crayfish Take Over Belgian Cemetery I couldn’t write that headline any better […]

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