sciencealert.com — China's Academy of Space Technology is working on an orbital power plant that would capture solar energy in space and beam it back to Earth.  The plant would be able to harness solar power even when it's cloudy back on Earth, since its photovoltaic array would be floating high above any terrestrial…

cnbc.com — Let's be honest, lazy people get a bad rap, especially when some of the world's most successful billionaires are perceived as the exact opposite. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, for instance gets up at 5 a.m. every day. He answers emails, eats breakfast with his family, reads the news, takes …

planetary.org — After months of unrelated political turmoil, multiple stop-gap spending bills, and an unprecedented government shutdown that shuttered the U.S. space program for 35 days, legislation providing NASA's 2019 budget was finally signed into law today. Remarkably, NASA did very well in the end. Congress …

cnbc.com — The golf cart-size Opportunity outlived its twin, the Spirit rover, by several years. The two slow-moving vehicles landed on opposite sides of the planet in 2004 for a mission that was meant to last 90 days. Its greatest achievement was discovering, along with Spirit , evidence that ancient Mars ha…

cnn.com — The elusive African black leopard is alive and well and living in Kenya -- and there are new pictures to prove it. A team of biologists shot rare footage of the sleek big cat after spending months watching and waiting, said Nick Pilfold, a global conservation scientist at the San Diego Zoo.   W…

foxnews.com — The wreck of the World War II aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) has been discovered off the Solomon Islands by a research organization set up by the late billionaire Paul Allen. The carrier was located in late January by the crew of the Research Vessel Petrel resting on the floor of the South Paci…

cnbc.com —   Elon Musk says he is "confident" moving to Mars will "one day" cost less than $500,000 and "maybe even" cost below $100,000. While the final cost is "very dependent on [the] volume" of travelers, Musk said the cost of moving to Mars will be "low enough that most people in advanced economies coul…

sciencealert.com — My ideas about animal behaviour were turned upside down in 2002 when I watched Betty, a New Caledonian crow, fashion a hook from a piece of wire and use it to pull a small container with meat from a tube. Betty's behaviour captivated scientists because it seemed so creative: there was no obvious so…

livescience.com — Scientists have discovered a brand-new kind of magnet hiding out in a uranium compound. The compound, USb2 (a compound of uranium and antimony), a so-called "singlet-based" magnet, is novel in that it generates magnetism in an entirely different way than any other magnet known to scientists. Elect…

nationalgeographic.com — Measurements from the Gaia spacecraft have adjusted predictions for when and how the Milky Way will collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is destined to collide with its largest neighbor, a sparkling collection of stars called the Andromeda galaxy. This cataclysm ha…