Ainura Kalau
Publishes 1 feed
Space Daily
Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
58 posts · contributor
Lately
Voyager 2’s three surviving instruments are part of humanity’s only direct scientific presence in interstellar space—and with no approved successor under development, engineers remotely reconfigured the 49-year-old probe’s power system in July 2026, completing a delicate operation across a 39-hour command-and-response delay that should preserve its science for at least another year.
Scientists in Iceland drilled straight into 900°C magma by accident — so energy-dense was the well that resulted, it could produce nearly ten times the power of a conventional geothermal well
Elephants are among the few animals shown to recognise themselves in a mirror, a test most species fail entirely — and when researchers painted a white X on one elephant’s forehead, she reached for herself, not the reflection
When scientists disrupted dopamine in hungry rats, the animals still showed pleasure when sweet food was placed in their mouths — they just lost the drive to work for it, suggesting dopamine governs wanting more than enjoyment
One set of simulations suggests Uranus may have been tipped over by at least two giant impacts rather than one: when researchers modelled a single abrupt collision acting on an existing moon-forming disk, the resulting moons orbited backward. Multiple impacts produced a prograde satellite system aligned with Uranus’s extraordinarily tilted equator—but newer models show that a single impact followed by moon formation remains possible.
A single army-ant colony can move like one creature made of hundreds of thousands of bodies — up to 700,000 workers with no leader, no central plan, and no ant understanding more than the neighbours around it, yet together solving problems no individual could even perceive
Mars lacks Earth’s protective global magnetic field, and a 2026 Boston University-led study revealed one consequence: solar-wind shear generates enormous plasma waves that tear clouds of atmospheric ions into space, with instantaneous fluxes 10–100 times greater than typical steady escape channels. Scientists think such events may have contributed to Mars’s transformation from a wetter, potentially habitable world into today’s frozen desert.
The sharpest-ever images of the Sun, published in August 2026, revealed plasma vortices as small as about 20 kilometres across—structures no previous telescope could resolve. They may help twist and transport magnetic energy through the solar atmosphere, potentially contributing to the still-unsolved mystery of why the corona is far hotter than the surface.
When scientists announced Webb’s first definitive detection of Neptune’s auroras in March 2025, they revealed another surprise: observations taken in 2023 showed that the planet’s upper atmosphere had cooled by several hundred degrees since Voyager 2 visited in 1989—and scientists still don’t know exactly why.
A microwave-oven-sized experiment inside NASA’s Perseverance rover made history in 2021 by extracting oxygen from Mars’s carbon-dioxide atmosphere—the first demonstration of producing a usable resource from the environment of another planet.
Biologists who necropsied 75 bats found dead under wind turbines in southern Alberta counted 32 with visible injuries and 69 with blood pooled in their chests, because the pressure drop behind a passing blade bursts a bat’s lungs without the blade ever touching it
Surveys at the Ivanpah solar site in the Mojave predicted at most 32 desert tortoises, and crews then unearthed close to 1,000, halted construction for three months and spent 56 million dollars relocating them, with one juvenile carried off to an eagle nest, microchip still pinging
Everything on this page was read from markup Ainura Kalau published — a rel="me" link, an h-card, or the feed’s own author element. Nothing was inferred from anywhere else. To correct or remove it, get in touch. Machine-readable: JSON