Lifeboat Foundation

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An asteroid-circling spacecraft has captured a cool snapshot of home.

NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft took the picture days before going into orbit around asteroid Bennu on New Year’s Eve.

The tiny asteroid — barely one-third of a mile (500 meters) across — appears as a big bright blob in the long-exposure photo released last week. Seventy million miles (110 million kilometers) away, Earth appears as a white dot, with the moon an even smaller dot but still clearly visible.

A total of 73 previously unrecorded varieties of apples and pears believed to be unique to Wales have been discovered by researchers.

About 200 trees were DNA-tested in the two-year project to find, catalogue and preserve new varieties.

Some have been propagated and are now being grown in 13 community orchards around Wales.

Astronomers have found a new exoplanet that could alter the standing theory of planet formation. With a mass that’s between that of Neptune and Saturn, and its location beyond the “snow line” of its host star, an alien world of this scale was supposed to be rare.

A long-simmering crisis for deep space missions ends before it could become a problem.

Researchers make robots teach themselves how to walk through trial and error, like babies, to navigate the real world.

The first direct evidence of white dwarf stars solidifying into crystals has been discovered by astronomers at the University of Warwick, and our skies are filled with them.

Observations have revealed that dead remnants of stars like our Sun, called white dwarfs, have a core of solid oxygen and carbon due to a phase transition during their lifecycle similar to water turning into ice but at much higher temperatures. This could make them potentially billions of years older than previously thought.

The discovery, led by Dr. Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay from the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics, has been published in Nature and is largely based on observations taken with the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite.

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Research says that giant, rotating black holes would give interstellar travelers a smooth ride.

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SAN DIEGO (Reuters) — Boeing Co unveiled a speedier and higher-flying version of a concept plane on Tuesday aimed at sharply reducing fuel use thanks to its elongated ultra-light wings.

The so-called Transonic Truss-Braced Wing aircraft boasts a 170-foot (52 meter) wingspan that sits atop the fuselage and is braced from underneath by a truss in a design reminiscent of biplanes from the early years of aviation.

The world’s largest planemaker and U.S. space agency NASA have been studying the concept plane for nearly a decade as part of the Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research program. Boeing unveiled a reconfigured model or prototype and artist’s rendering at an aerospace conference in San Diego.

ShakeAlertLA gives city residents a few seconds’ warning when an earthquake hits. It’s the first publicly available app to do so in the US.