Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center and experts Johnson Space Center in Houston (led by astronaut Alvin Drew) are tinkering with the spaceship mockup, deciding the right size, necessary equipment, and everything else that’s going to make a mission to Mars, a near-by asteroid, or the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point (277,000 miles away from Earth) as pleasant as possible. In the same building where the Apollo Moon buggy was built, scientists can adjust the mockup to find the optimal form for the vessel to do that....

Juno’s original mission was to learn about Jupiter’s formation, magnetic field, and composition under its surface clouds. But in its extended mission, it’s going far beyond that. On Monday, June 7, the spacecraft shot past Jupiter’s Ganymede—the largest moon in the solar system—snapping a few quick but iconic images and taking readings of the moon’s magnetic field from just over 600 miles away. The team of scientists running Juno is just starting to analyze the data, says Scott Bolton, the head of the mission and a space scientist at the Southwestern Research Institute....

Meanwhile, Congress recently released the 2022 federal budget, setting NASA’s yearly funds at $24 billion–lower than the agency had hoped, but with more money earmarked for the Artemis program than NASA had originally requested. The issues with Artemis have been well known and frequently discussed in the space community for a long time, says John Logsdon, an professor emeritus at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University who founded the university’s Space Policy Institute....

In the aftermath, principals and teachers were worried about the disaster’s effect on the kids in their schools, says Lisa Gibbs, director of the Jack Brockhoff Child Health and Wellbeing Program at the University of Melbourne, who worked closely with school principals and teachers. “There were real concerns about what they were seeing,” Gibbs says. Her new study, which examined data from those schools, confirmed their worries: It found kids that saw more impact of the fire had poorer progression of their academic performance four years out from the fire....

Of course, with a cheaper price come additional caveats. Apart from the advertising, subscribers can expect a streaming quality cap at 720p/HD (meaning no more Stranger Things binges in 4K) and will no longer be able to download titles for offline viewing. Additionally, a “limited number” of titles will be missing from the “Basic with Ads” tier catalog due to licensing restrictions, although Netflix COO Greg Peters it’s a bit that “we’re working on....

The discovery, Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, was a carcharodontosaur, or a “shark-toothed” dinosaur, a kind of allosaur characterized by its large size and serrated teeth. It’s the first of its kind to be found in Central Asia. And while paleontologists only had a single fossil to work with—a part of the dino’s upper jaw—researchers have concluded that this specimen likely measured around 26 feet (8 meters) in length and weighed about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms)....

They spend inordinate amounts of time grooming themselves, and while that might seem a bit excessive to us filthy humans, they’ve got cause. A new study finds that if you spread out all their skin and hair (insert many ways to skin a cat pun here) those adorable balls of allergens fluff have roughly the same surface area as a ping pong table. Researchers from Georgia Tech were trying to figure out how animals of different sizes manage to stay clean, so they looked at 24 studies and measured 27 different mammals and insects....

The new telescope is called CHEOPS, for CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite, although it is not shaped like a pyramid. Its targets will be nearby stars that are known to harbor planets. Like Kepler, it will use the transit method of hunting planets, looking for blips in star brightness to tell if something is orbiting around them. This will allow more accurate measurements of a given planet’s radius. Astronomers know the masses of several planets, partly through observations that measure how the planets affect the wobbling of their stars....

The combination of magic and science drew a few hundred people to the auditorium of the New York Academy of Sciences for Science & The City’s third installment in a series on the five senses. “See What You’ve Been Missing: The Science of Vision” featured a professor of biology and engineering brought face to face with a man who pickpocketed the Secret Service during a visit with President Carter. Prestidigitation was also part of the show....

Boat builders, sailors, and engineers have developed technological innovations like the Seabin to minimize all sorts of litter floating in the ocean. These mechanical cleanup inventions are fixed-point devices designed to separate and remove marine debris from various bodies of water. They work by sucking water from the surface and intercepting floating debris or lifting trash from the water onto a conveyor belt that gathers everything in a dumpster. However, they might have a limited benefit in reducing plastic pollution....

Oceanic animals that make shells by and large use calcium carbonate to build them. In a healthy ocean, CaCO3 ions are present in surface waters at tremendous concentrations, a concept known as supersaturation. When the water becomes more acidic, it is less able to hold the ions and so the concentration becomes under-saturated. That means animals will have to use proportionally more energy to build their shells, which will likely mean they have little left to find food and reproduce....

And so Liquid Robotics’ engineers dumped their robots into the rolling water and turned them loose, uncertain as anyone else whether the robots could survive the weather, waves, and wildlife they would surely encounter on a trans-Pacific crossing. There are sharks out there, after all. Massive waves and gale-force winds. There’s a whole lot of saltwater out there, itself a force for destruction and disruption of mechanical systems. And yet almost exactly a year after launching the Wave Glider known as “Papa Mau” navigated around the Great Barrier Reef and arrived off the coast of Queensland Australia last week, half a world away from where it started and only somewhat worse for wear....

This is cool on a number of levels. First of all, though the researchers have not yet experimented with a real Olympic swimming pool, the ability to rapidly turn large bodies of water into gelatin is sure to have major impacts in the disciplines of both cocktail party tricks and teenage petty vandalism. But from a materials science standpoint the polymer really is a breakthrough, exhibiting properties that are pretty strange and exciting, at least if you’re the kind of person who gets excited by material properties....

A timely Bloomberg article about this year’s unusually small harvests sparked a flurry of concern about a possible fry shortage. But to understand what’s going on, you need to know some things about potatoes. Today, they’re one of the world’s most important crops. But what most North Americans know as a potato is a specific domesticated version of ancient taters that grew in the Andes. They were brought to Spain in the 1500s and to Britain a few centuries later, and slowly made their way into the European diet....

Researchers have long puzzled over the way Earth’s oxygen appears to have risen haltingly over time. The planet started out with almost no oxygen, but then seems to have abruptly jumped up to roughly a few percent of its current abundance around two billion years ago—an episode dubbed the Great Oxidation Event. Next, oxygen leveled out for a timespan scientists call the boring billion years, before another sharp increase. Who can we thank for all this breathable oxygen?...

Beneath the surface Undoing our damage to oysters can help ease our impact on everything else. Each one can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. Replenished beds could help restore the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding lands, a region known for rare birds, horseshoe crabs, and ­agricultural pollution. At the bottom Larvae need something to hold on to. In lieu of their layered ancestral homes, 40-micron eggs can grow on discarded oyster shells from restaurants....

Millions of years ago, shifting sand dunes covered much of the western U.S. Over time, the sand dunes became the Navajo Sandstone rock, which is visible throughout much of the Colorado Plateau region today. Potholes are circular depressions in the sandstone carved by erosional processes, such as when pebbles or sand swirl in running water. They can look deceivingly like dinosaur footprints, which makes life complicated for scientists. In their published findings about the discovery, University of Utah professor Marjorie Chan and graduate student Winston Seiler acknowledged that there are strong arguments for the features being potholes and not dinosaur tracks....

The Atlantic has a great look at the latest trend of Instagram influencers selling image presets that allow followers to give their photos the same overall look. Adobe only gave the mobile version of Lightroom the ability to use custom and purchased presets, even though photographers had been using them on computers for years. You can use presets from photography companies like Mastin Labs, which makes excellent presets designed to mimic the look of film photography....

Although Sony offers a few design options for its PS4 gamers, other manufacturers have also tagged in with high-end, high-performance options to entice the hardcore (or anyone who’s thrown a standard PS4 controller against the wall in the fit of rage and now needs a replacement). These three are among the top of the list for performance, function, and style. Are you a PS4 gamer who secretly prefers the hefty Xbox controller?...