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Microgravity environments do strange and often undesirable things to the human body, such as weakening muscles and bones, shrinking hearts, and flattening eyeballs. But it’s also known to make astronauts a bit taller, as Norishige Kanai is now learning. The Japanese astronaut arrived at the ISS just three weeks ago.  In just three weeks he’s already grown an astonishing 3.5 inches (9 cm)—and he’s now really worried that he won’t fit into the seat of the Russian Soyuz return vehicle. This may seem like nothing but it is a serious problem and may have some serious consequences. “Good morning, good morning,” tweeted Kanai earlier today from the International Space Station. “Today there is a serious report... I had physical measurements since I got to space... [with] heights up to 9 centimeters! I grew like some plant in just three weeks, nothing like this since I was a junior high school student. I am a bit worried whether my body will fit in the return Soyuz seat.” Along with astron...

Imagine this: you are on a space exploration adventure and nothing could be better. Your diet is fantastic, consisting of all the astronauts typically eat and your eyes are the witnesses to beautiful celestial wonders. You look back towards our tiny, blue marble of a planet and you remember that in just a few hours, you are returning from your exotic travels.  Everything is normal, all works, nothing to fear about. However, so you thought. Right before going back down to Earth, someone accidentally opened the airlock and you found yourself floating in the vacuum of space completely unprotected, and devoid of oxygen. Panic immediately sets in because you know just how horrific it is to be stranded in such a vacuum. Being in the black void of the heavens just as you are poses a danger like no other that will definitely be the cause of your death. Even if after a few moments you found your way back to safety once more, there is no possible way reverse a substantial amount of damage y...

The Properties of Expanding Universes, Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis, has been published online for the first time and is free to read. However, the thesis, submitted in 1966, may not be a stroll in the park for most. This was Hawking's second degree, after his first-class bachelors degree in physics at Oxford. It can now be downloaded from the University of Cambridge's open access repository, Apollo. Penned as a 24-year-old Cambridge postgraduate student, Hawking explores "some implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe" in the academic work. He rules out that galaxies could form through the growth of initially small perturbations. After he was awarded his PhD, Hawking became a research fellow at Cambridge, and then later became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 to 2009. He became widely known following his scientific books aimed at a general audience. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time has remained the most popular book on the Sun...

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...

It seems like a perfect job, right? Kind of a superhero-y, defending the planet from bad aliens, perhaps with a splendid outfit, maybe a supergalactic weapon of some sort? Not really, but NASA truly is looking to fill the spot of “Planetary Protection Officer” (PPO), and you can fill and submit your application here . The position is essentially pretty high ranking and the pay’s really not bad, with the salary promised up to $187,000. But then, if you are tasked with a mission to protect the Earth from alien contamination on Earth, we shouldn’t really be scrimping.   OK, you probably don't get the outfit. Lia Koltyrina/Shutterstock The position was made after the agreement of the  Outer Space Treaty  in 1967. It requires making sure humans, in the throes of space exploration, don’t contaminate any planets, moons, or other objects existing with in space, and – just as essentially – avoid any unwelcome extraterrestrial microbes from returning to Earth. The Treaty ...

For Americans, NASA has been a household name since the '60s when it accomplished the apparently impossible, transporting and landing humans on the Moon. Since then, NASA has discovered other alien worlds like, Mars and Saturn's moon Titan, as well as flew past every planet in our solar system. It has accomplished so much on a very small budget. Just consider if we gave NASA hundreds of billions of dollars a year like what we spend on the US military. What more could NASA have accomplished over the years? The US already spends more on space exploration than any other nation in the world. NASA gets a big amount of this investment, the country's primary agency for space exploration. But this part of the budget that NASA gets is nothing compared to the overall US Federal budget. You will be surprised to know that after NASA landed the first man on the Moon back in 1969, its budget has dropped from 4.5% of the Federal budget to less than 0.5%. So let’s imagine if NASA’s budge...

A planet-size object may be orbiting the sun in the icy reaches of the solar system beyond Pluto. Scientists at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) have determined that an unseen object with a mass somewhere between that of Earth and Mars could be lurking in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune filled with thousands of icy asteroids, comets and dwarf planets. A planetary-mass object the size of Mars may be lurking in the outer solar system. Credit: Heather Roper/LPL In January 2016, a separate group of scientists predicted the existence of a Neptune-size planet orbiting the sun far, far beyond Pluto — about 25 times farther from the sun than Pluto is. This hypothetical planet was dubbed "Planet Nine," so if both predictions are correct, one of these putative objects could be the solar system's 10th planet. The so-called "planetary-mass object" described by the scientists from LPL appears to affect the orbits of a population ...

Asgardia, a rather strange effort to initiate a nation in space, has declared it wants to ultimately build a space station in Earth orbit and on the Moon. In a press conference yesterday in Hong Kong, Asgardia also revealed its plans to launch its primary satellite, Asgardia-1, in autumn this year. Asgardia claims to become the world’s first space nation. It plans to launch a small cubesat on an Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft from Wallops Island, Virginia in September. Mainly a flying 512gb hard drive, this will be deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) by NanoRacks, and orbit Earth for five years. People who have already signed up online to join the space nation, called Asgardians, will be able to send data onto the cubesat. While this is maybe envisioned to be photos and messages, there is the probability this could be some kind of data harbor for illegal content. Asgardia told New Scientist , though, that they would filter any data before it is uploaded. Each person can...