Science

FILE PHOTO: The Boeing logo is pictured at the Latin American Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition fair (LABACE) at Congonhas Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil August 14, 2018. Picture taken August 14, 2018. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Boeing’s multibillion dollar contract to build U.S. astronaut capsules received an “unnecessary” extension from NASA, a watchdog

HUAILAI, China (Reuters) – China on Thursday successfully completed a crucial landing test in northern Hebei province ahead of a historic unmanned exploration mission to Mars next year. A lander for China’s Mars mission is seen after a hovering-and-obstacle avoidance test at a test facility in Huailai, Hebei province, China November 14, 2019. Picture taken

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Genetic material extracted from a 1.9 million-year-old fossil tooth from southern China shows that the world’s largest-known ape – an extinct creature dubbed “Giganto” that once inhabited Southeast Asia – was an oversized cousin of today’s orangutans. The findings, announced on Wednesday, shed light on a species, called Gigantopithecus blacki, that has

A view of lab-made human skin, made from skin cells and collagen, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore November 11, 2019. REUTERS/Yiming Woo SINGAPORE (Reuters) – A piece of skin about the size of your thumbnail can be printed in less than a minute, scientists in Singapore say, a game-changing step for the future of

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Fossils unearthed in southern Germany of a remarkable ape that lived about 11.6 million years ago may dramatically alter the understanding of the evolutionary origins of a fundamental human trait – walking upright on two legs. Twenty-one fossilized bones of the most complete partial skeleton of a male of the extinct ape

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – A satellite mission to measure global methane emissions from oil and gas facilities will be based in New Zealand, the government said on Wednesday, in a collaboration with a U.S. environmental group. The MethaneSAT, due to be launched in 2022, is designed to locate and measure methane from human sources worldwide, and

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The journey of NASA’s dauntless Voyager 2 spacecraft through our solar system’s farthest reaches has given scientists new insight into a poorly understood distant frontier: the unexpectedly distinct boundary marking where the sun’s energetic influence ends and interstellar space begins. FILE PHOTO: NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in space is shown in this artist’s

FILE PHOTO: The Boeing logo is displayed on a screen, at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., August 7, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid SEATTLE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Boeing Co said on Monday that one of three parachutes failed to open during a crucial unmanned test of the CST-100 Starliner, which the company is

BEIJING (Reuters) – China launched a new high-resolution remote sensing satellite capable of providing stereoscopic imagery on Sunday, state-run media said, marking another important step as Beijing seeks to reduce reliance on foreign technology in topographic mapping. A rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre in northern China at 11:22 a.m. local time,

Scientists check plants inside of an aeroponic growing chamber system as an experiment called Marsonaut at Prague University of Life Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic, October 30, 2019. REUTERS/David W Cerny PRAGUE (Reuters) – Czech scientists have opened a lab to experiment growing food for environments with extreme conditions and lack of water, such as

BANDUNG, Indonesia (Reuters) – A watchmaker in Indonesia’s Bandung city thinks the next step in sustainability is a wristwatch with a strap made out of the complex root structure of a mushroom. A worker prepares mycelium leather to be used for wristwatches at a workshop of Pala Nusantara, a watchmaking company, in Bandung, West Java

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A large ancient wetlands region spanning northern Botswana – once teeming with life but now dominated by desert and salt flats – may represent the ancestral homeland of all of the 7.7 billion people on Earth today, researchers said on Monday. FILE PHOTO: Vanessa Hayes speaks with Headman ǀkun ǀkunta, from an

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon’s secretive X-37B spaceplane landed in Florida on Sunday after a record-long orbital flight lasting more than two years, the U.S. Air Force said, capping the latest test mission for an array of military technologies. The unpiloted X-37B, built by Boeing Co., touched down on an air strip at NASA’s Kennedy

FILE PHOTO: A passenger plane is seen with the full moon behind as it begins its final landing approach to Heathrow Airport in London, Britain, September 24, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA will send a golf cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022 to search for deposits of water below the surface, an

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A revelatory cache of fossils dug up in central Colorado details as never before the rise of mammals from the post-apocalyptic landscape after an asteroid smacked Earth 66 million years ago and annihilated three-quarters of all species including the dinosaurs. Fossilized mammal skull fossils and lower jaw retrieved from the Corral Bluffs

BERLIN/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Wednesday it had achieved a breakthrough in computing research by using a quantum computer to solve in minutes a complex problem that would take today’s most powerful supercomputer thousands of years to crack. Google researchers expect that quantum computers within a few years will fuel advancements