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An ancient natural nuclear reactor that was churning away nearly 2 billion years ago sounds like a made-up myth. Perhaps it's because the word reactor suggests a manmade structure. Instead, the reactor is an area of natural uranium inside the Earth's crust, detected in Okla, Gabon. Uranium is naturally radioactive, and the settings in this rocky area happened to be just accurate to do some nuclear reactions.  The natural reactor must have annoyed nuclear scientists: The first nuclear reactor to provide electricity was build up in 1951, and this only made a small amount of energy. The pile of rock in the ground in Okla, instead, had generated nuclear power around 2 billion years ago! Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors It was discovered in  1972 , when some French scientists took uranium ore from the mine in Gabon to test its uranium content. Typically, uranium ore is made up of three types (isotopes) of uranium, each one with a different number of neutrons: U...

On our planet, we’re quite in luck if we see a few hundred meteors an hour during a meteor shower. But if you were on Mars about three years ago, nevertheless, you would have witnessed something extraordinary – 108,000 meteors per hour, the biggest meteor shower ever in recorded history on any planet. This meteor shower was a result of Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) zipping past the planet on October 19, 2014. We were lucky to have a spacecraft in circling the planet back then, and what they observed was unbelievable.  Observations from the event were offered few days ago at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2017 in Riga, Latvia. Dr Beatriz Sanchez-Cano from the University of Leicester, who co-presented the findings, said “This is one of the most exciting planetary events that we’ll see in our lifetime. Mars was literally engulfed by the coma, the comet’s outer atmosphere, for several hours.” Siding Spring flew past Mars at a distance of 140,000 kilometers (87,000 mi...

The bells of joyful news have begun ringing-- after quite the hiatus, the EM drive has returned! Researchers from China’s space agency have released a video through state media in which they show what appears to be a fully functioning EM drive. For those who are unfamiliar to the EM drive, here’s the crash course. An EM drive, also known as a radio frequency resonant cavity thruster, is theorized to be able to generate thrust without the need of a propellant. The thrust is of the electromagnetic world that is produced from bouncing microwaves back and forth inside a cavity. Think of it like this-- a person is sitting inside of a box and they are faced with a task to make the box move. They do so by pushing out the walls and moving around inside of the box. Also, to top it all off, the total momentum generated by the drive increases as it moves. If an EM drive is to enter our current world of reality, it would be revolutionary, to say the least. Faster space travel and cheaper spacefli...

The cosmos may have existed always with no beginning, according to a new quantum model that relates quantum correction terms to match Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This theory may also cover for dark matter and dark energy, solving numerous problems at once. The generally acknowledged age of the cosmos, as projected by general relativity, is almost 13.8 billion years. In the start, everything in existence is considered to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or known as singularity. Only after this phase it started to inflate in a “Big Bang”, which is considered as official beginning of the universe. Even though the Big Bang singularity ascends directly and inevitably from the mathematics of general relativity, some researchers see it as problematical since the math can describe only what occurred directly after—not at or before—the singularity. “The Big Bang singularity is one of the biggest problem of general relativity as the laws of physics seem to break down ...

Japanese company Obayashi has declared that they will have a space elevator assembled by 2050. The elevator will spread 96,000 km (60,000 mi) into space and will transport people and shipment to a new space station. It will also work as a port to transport astronauts to Mars and beyond. “The construction process consists of deploying the cable and constructing the facilities. It is necessary to analyze the cable dynamics in order to estimate the characteristics of the cable, counter-weight, facilities and climbers, and in order to determine the construction procedures. Parameters for the cable dynamics include tension, displacement and elongation of the cable due to ascending climbers, masses of counter-weight and cable, wind, and fixed loads of facilities. With the help of a computer simulation of the equations of motion, we designed the system and determined the construction process.” ~ Obayashi Watch the video below to learn more about their model.

How the Earth moves through the space? Here is an impressive visualisation of how our planet is moving through the space. So watch and learn:

Almost 1 billion years from this moment, the sun will enter in its dying phase and blow off its outer atmosphere, eating our minute planet in hot plasma. Fortunately, our galaxy will be left with NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft to remember us as a sign of existence of humans. The two nuclear-powered spacecraft started their mission 40 years ago and became the first and only machines to take close-up photos of Uranus and Neptune, the planets' moons and rings, and some other objects in the outer solar system. The Voyagers are also carrying a golden record of sounds, images, and other info about existence of life on Earth — a simple human collection that aliens might one day discover and decode. The mission is now comprehensive in an extraordinary PBS documentary called " The Farthest ", which premiered on August 23 and re-aired on September 13 at 10 p.m. ET. Brad Smith, a Voyager imaging scientist, said in the movie "Fifty years from now, Voyager will be the science...

Accelerating expansion may not be real but instead be an apparent effect, according to new research published in the journal of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . A new study by a group of researchers at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, found the fit of Type Ia supernovae to a model of a universe devoid of all dark energy to be a better fit than to the model containing dark energy.   Dark energy, proposed in 1998, has been assumed to form an approximate 70% of the present material content of our Universe. This nebulous quantity is a popular, well known component of unknown physics. Current models of the Universe require dark energy to explain the observed rate of acceleration in the expansion of our Universe. Such measures are based off of measurements in the distance of supernova explosions in distant galaxies that appear to be farther apart than they should be if the acceleration of expansion were not taking place. This brings a question...

NASA’s Curiosity rover made a new discovery that raises more questions about the possibility of life on Mars. The conspiracy theorists and many other fantastic people of the human population who believe that extraterrestrial life, and life on Mars exists/existed have been gaining significant evidence on their side. Direct evidence of liquid water has already been found on the surface of this planet, but so far not any microbes yet despite the fact that life on Mars, in theory, has been dead for billions of years.  Image: NASA/JPL-CALTECH However, NASA’s Curiosity Rover has found new, compelling evidence that advocates the case of life on Mars very strongly. A 3.8 billion year old Gale crater located on Mars, boron has been found. The reason as to why such a discovery is so significant is because boron is an element that can catalyze the formation of RNA (ribonucleic acid that is responsible to carrying the instructions from DNA to proteins) when dissolved in water. Also, the boron...