Newsdesk Archive
The ancient city of Teotihuacan, in the Valley of Mexico, is well known as a large urban center. Established around 100 BC, Teotihuacan grew to be one of the largest cities on the planet by 500 AD, with more than 100,000 people living in the center and the surrounding neighborhoods. Religious buildings like the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon are still visited today, and the city boasted multi-level apartment buildings to house its massive population. Many of these people came to Teotihuacan from other parts of the Mesoamerican world, and a new DNA study of the neighborhood of Teopancazco is revealing the genetic diversity of the immigrants.
The human brain is unique - no other animal possesses such a large brain relative to the size of its body.
It has been argued that an increase in meat consumption could have triggered the increase in size, but now scientists believe that we may have another food to thank: the humble potato.
For most farms, manure is a pungent problem. At Homestead Dairy, it smells like money.
The family-run American farm invested in a biogas recovery system which transforms cow poo and other waste into electricity.
China is set to build a giant solar power station in the Gobi desert, which could generate enough energy to supply one million homes.
The proposed power station will measure 10 square miles and generate 200 megawatts of solar energy.
Chinese scientists have discovered what could be a huge hidden ocean underneath one of the driest places on earth, the South China Morning Post reported on 30 July.
The Tarim basin in northwestern Xinjiang, China, is one of the driest places on Earth, but the vast amount of salt water concealed underneath could equal 10 times the water found in all five of the Great Lakes in the US.
Concentric circles of rocky hills and valleys in South Africa tell the story of a billion-year-old collapsed volcano in newly released photos from NASA.
Related: Risk of future Nepal-India earthquake increases
Roman Schnabel, a physics professor at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics has published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters outlining a plan for entangling two "massive" objects. He and his team are still working on a way to actually carry out the plan, but if successful, the group would succeed in entangling two 0.1 kg mass mirrors, which would represent a much larger example of entanglement than anything that has come before—up till now the largest objects to be entangled were of micron size.
This week, South Korea shouted a new entry onto the list of drone countermeasures. A research project by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), set to be presented in DC next week, uses sound to disable the internal gyroscopes that balance drones.
Establishing a permanent base on another planet is going to be insanely difficult, but NASA is hoping to make at least one part of the mission easier by building quadcopters that can scout for resources and shelter on other worlds. Prototypes being constructed at NASA's experimental Swamp Works laboratory under the name Extreme Access Flyers are designed to operate in very thin atmospheres or even completely airless environments, with some using gas jets instead of rotors to fly and maneuver.
Astronomers said Thursday they had found a planetary system with three super-Earths orbiting a bright, dwarf star—one of them likely a volcanic world of molten rock.
The four-planet system had been hiding out in the M-shaped, northern hemisphere constellation Cassiopeia, "just" 21 light years from Earth, a team reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Using the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at the La Silla Observatory and the ESO 0.5-m telescope at the Observatory of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile near Santiago, Chile, astronomers have detected the chemical element lithium in the material ejected by a nova, a star that suddenly increases in brightness by several magnitudes. The finding could help explain the mystery of why many young stars seem to have more lithium than expected.
The Sunspot Number is a crucial tool used to study the solar dynamo, space weather and climate change. It has now been recalibrated and shows a consistent history of solar activity over the past few centuries. The new record has no significant long-term upward trend in solar activity since 1700, as was previously indicated. This suggests that rising global temperatures since the industrial revolution cannot be attributed to increased solar activity.
The largest and most powerful hurricanes ever recorded on Earth spanned over 1,000 miles across with winds gusting up to around 200 mph. That's wide enough to stretch across nearly all U.S. states east of Texas. But even that kind of storm is dwarfed by the Great Red Spot, a gigantic storm in Jupiter. There, gigantic means twice as wide as Earth.
On June 3, 2015, more than a month before New Horizons, flying faster than speeding bullet, reached its rendezvous with the Pluto system, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute who is also a space artist posted a “final guess” at what the planet might look like.
Fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space officially is on the menu for the first time for NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. Expedition 44 crew members, including NASA's one-year astronaut Scott Kelly, are ready to sample the fruits of their labor after harvesting a crop of "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce Monday, Aug. 10, from the Veggie plant growth system on the nation’s orbiting laboratory.
The Japanese distiller behind the world’s best whisky is preparing to launch six of its best samples into space to see if it can be improved.
Suntory is sending the samples of whisky and other alcoholic beverages into space to test the effects of a zero gravity environment on the ageing process and the development of “mellowness”.
Mars turned cold and dry long ago, but researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered evidence of an ancient lake that likely represents some of the last potentially habitable surface water ever to exist on the Red Planet.
Astronomers have found what appears to be the largest feature in the observable universe: a ring of nine gamma ray bursts -- and hence galaxies - 5 billion light years across.
Astronomers have spotted the farthest-flung galaxy in the known universe.
The newfound galaxy, known as EGSY8p7, lies about 13.2 billion light-years from Earth — meaning astronomers are now seeing the mass of stars as it existed just 600 million years or so after the Big Bang that created the universe.
Astronomers peering back towards the earliest epoch of the universe believe they've seen the birth of a galaxy for the first time.
The observations, reported in the journal Nature, may resolve one of the big outstanding questions in astronomy: exactly how are galaxies made?
Astronomers are constantly uncovering the "most distant," "most massive" or "most energetic" objects in our universe, but today, researchers have announced the discovery of a truly monstrous structure consisting of a ring of galaxies around 5 billion light-years across.
Now, if you don’t know about The Berenstein Bears, they were a series of children’s books, and eventually a cartoon, created by Stan and Jan Berenstein. They focused on a family of bears, and did the usual educational children’s book/tv series thing. Simple enough. I remember them, vaguely, and I believe I owned a book or two when I was a kid. It’s been a while.
So what’s the problem?
They’re not The Berenstein Bears.
Two separate cases of unusual-looking lights -- over cities on different continents -- were captured on video, prompting speculation that the objects were everything from alien life forms to popular Chinese lanterns.
Related: The moment a 'UFO overtakes' Virgin Atlantic jumbo jet during take-off from New York JFK Airport
Related: Crab-like 'alien facehugger' in a cave is spotted on Mars in latest bizarre claim by conspiracy theorists
Lurking in the dark depths of the sea, a new species that looks more like an alien than a fish has been discovered, a creature with needlelike teeth and a glowing fishing pole of sorts atop its head.
Divers often swim past bizarre creatures of the deep, but an elephant-size, jellylike blob left a group of them mystified.
The transparent sphere floated about 72 feet (22 meters) below sea level off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.
Scientists have identified the stem cells behind the liver’s legendary ability to replenish its tissue.
Stem cells not only bolster their own numbers but also become other kinds of cells through a process called differentiation, thereby keeping an organ populated as mature cells die off. The stem cells underpinning this process in the liver had never been identified.
From background radiation to chemicals in the food chain, environmental changes are contributing to a rapid global rise in neurological disease
Alt: People are developing dementia earlier and dying of it more, a study shows
Sleeping in the side position, as compared to on one’s back or stomach, may more effectively remove brain waste and prove to be an important practice to help reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, new research suggests.
When political candidates give a speech or debate an opponent, it's not just what they say that matters—it's also how they say it.
A new study by researchers at the University of Miami and Duke University shows that voters naturally seem to prefer candidates with deeper voices, which they associate with strength and competence more than age.
A large body of psychological research on the ‘weapons effect’ may help explain the often violent interactions between police and the policed
When police officers put on their badges and blues, do they somehow change inside?
Aristotle may have been more on the money than he realized in saying man is a political animal, according to research published Wednesday linking genes with liberal or conservative leanings.
Or, to be precise, a specific variant of one gene that would seem to exert greater sway over women than men.
In the wake of increasingly frequent sightings and two fatalities, the Peruvian government announced last month that it would attempt to help and potentially contact an isolated indigenous tribe that lives deep in the Amazon. But some fear the plan could further jeopardize the group, and on 3 August, the government backtracked on the implications of its announcement, insisting that it would not make the first move toward contact, though it will respond to communication initiated by the tribe.
Plants are intelligent. Plants deserve rights. Plants are like the Internet – or more accurately the Internet is like plants. To most of us these statements may sound, at best, insupportable or, at worst, crazy. But a new book, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist), Stefano Mancuso and journalist, Alessandra Viola, makes a compelling and fascinating case not only for plant sentience and smarts, but also plant rights.
Anyone who has sweltered in a south-facing office during the summer knows the power of solar energy streaming through a window.
In fact, no reputable urban architect today would design such a workspace without treated windows to reduce the sun's glare and heat.
Advertising giant M&C Saatchi is currently testing advertising billboards with hidden Microsoft Kinect cameras that read viewers' emotions and react according to whether a person's facial expression is happy, sad or neutral.
The test adverts – which feature a fictitious coffee brand named Bahio – have already appeared on Oxford Street and Clapham Common in London.
A domestic sheep has given birth to a baby mouflon in a rare successful example of interspecies cloning, according to scientists in Iran.
The wild Isfahan mouflon – or ovis orientalis isphahanica – was cloned by researchers at Iran’s Royan Institute, which is dedicated to reproductive biomedicine and stem cell research, using the domestic sheep as a surrogate mother.
It has long been known that some frogs secrete venom out of their skin, but two frogs have taken this phenomenon to a whole new level by using their heads as venomous weapons.
The venom released from the head of one of the frogs is so toxic that it could kill 80 humans, or more than 300,000 mice.
The effect of alcohol on humans is well-documented in academic research, anecdotal evidence and police reports, but what of the fish's inebriation I hear you cry?
Fortunately, given there is now a study for just about everything, we have some answers, after a research team from NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering's Dynamical Systems Laboratory conducted an experiment in which zebra fish were allowed to swim in a solution of ethanol.
Humpback whales don't just sing songs — they compose with the whales around them, singing a song that evolves over time. Scientists didn't know that until they started recording whale sounds in the 1960s and spent years listening. The evolution of this "culture of listening" among researchers is the focus of Morning Edition's weekly summer series, Close Listening: Decoding Nature Through Sound.
Take a close look at a house cat's eyes and you'll see pupils that look like vertical slits. But a tiger has round pupils — like humans do. And the eyes of other animals, like goats and horses, have slits that are horizontal.
Scientists have now done the first comprehensive study of these three kinds of pupils. The shape of the animal's pupil, it turns out, is closely related to the animal's size and whether it's a predator or prey.
Horses share some surprisingly similar facial expressions to humans and chimps, according to new University of Sussex research.
Mammal communication researchers have shown that, like humans, horses use muscles underlying various facial features - including their nostrils, lips and eyes - to alter their facial expressions in a variety of social situations.
In the 1880s, a wild menace haunted the Arizona territory. It was known as the Red Ghost, and its legend grew as it roamed the high country. It trampled a woman to death in 1883. It was rumored to stand 30 feet tall. A cowboy once tried to rope the Ghost, but it turned and charged his mount, nearly killing them both. One man chased it, then claimed it disappeared right before his eyes. Another swore it devoured a grizzly bear.
For decades, scientists have constructed competing hypothetical models explaining how and when anatomically modern humans (AMH), or early modern humans, left their original homelands in Africa to colonize and populate the globe. Not to be confused with the models that suggest the far earlier movement out of Africa by the hominids known as Homo erectus—a more ancient human species—the AMH's are thought to have dispersed out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, according to one broadly accepted theory.
Bloodthirsty gladiatorial clashes may not be returning to the Colosseum any time soon but an Italian government proposal to restore the ancient amphitheatre’s arena has provoked plenty of fury this week.
The sheer size of Marden Henge makes it hard to notice from the ground, even when you’re standing in the middle of it.
Its massive earthen berms, once ten feet high and encircling nearly 40 acres, have gradually slumped over the millennia. Its fertile soil has been heavily plowed by farmers, grazed by cattle and sheep, and overrun in places by sedge, nettle, and stately oaks. When you look around the henge today on a fine summer day, it appears to be nothing more than peaceful, undulating farmland.
When it comes to flood preparation, what seems like a good solution today might be making things worse in the long run.
A pair of studies in Science this week look at the way cities in coastal areas are preparing for the cataclysmic flooding and storms that will threaten them over the next few centuries. Their conclusions are both terrifying and heartening—let’s take a look.
Archaeologists have discovered a mysterious Stonehenge-style monolith in the deep sea off the coast of Sicily, shedding new light on the earliest civilizations in the Mediterranean basin.
Broken in two parts, the 3.2-foot-long monolith has a rather regular shape and features three holes of similar diameter. One, which can be found at its end, crosses it completely from part to part, the others appear at two sides of the massive stone.
A soft-bodied, fernlike creature reproduced in Earth's ancient oceans about 565 million years ago, making it the earliest known example of procreation in a complex organism, a new study finds.
People who request an extra kick to their curry could also be adding years to their life, according to a large study which linked frequent consumption of spicy food to longevity.
Researchers examining the diets of almost 500,000 people in China over seven years recorded that those who ate spicy foods one or two days a week had a 10% reduced risk of death compared with those who ate such meals less than once a week.
A diet high in refined carbohydrates may lead to an increased risk for new-onset depression in postmenopausal women, according to a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Related: You can trick yourself into being happy ... if you make life worse first
No matter how much marijuana you did in your rebellious youth – or how little because you were a good lad – it will not come back to haunt you as an adult much at all.
A brain circuit that helps create new memories to erase scary ones has been identified, at least in mice.
Related: Weed: Good for the Bones?
Humans see colour differently in the summer with yellow seeming more green than in the winter months, scientists have shown for the first time
The researchers at York University looked at how colour perception changes between seasons and in particular how humans process the colour known as unique yellow.
The sun's ultimate destiny will mirror the drama captured in vivid new photos of this ghostly bubble — the glowing remnant of a slowly dying star.
A collapsing star released this shell of glowing gases, known as the Southern Owl Nebula, which has grown to 4 light-years across.
Our solar system has been voyaging through the very low density Local Interstellar Cloud, a region about 30 light-years across that's as sparse as a handful of air stretched over a column that is hundreds of light years long, or about one atom per three cubic centimeters of space. Earth and our Sun has been traveling through the Cloud for somewhere between 40,000 and 150,000 years and will probably not emerge for another 20,000 years.
In an unusual treat for astronomers, and perhaps Pink Floyd fans, what is often known as the dark side of the moon has been captured, fully illuminated, by a camera aboard a Nasa satellite.
Alt: Breathtaking photo shows moon crossing Earth's face
Stone Age monuments such as Stonehenge suggest our prehistoric ancestors were keen astronomers.
Now archaeologists believe that the ancient Irish were the first to record an eclipse 5,354 years ago.
A 1,600-year-old Mayan stone tablet describing the rule of an ancient king has been unearthed in the ruins of a temple in Guatemala.
The broken tablet, or stela, depicts the king's head, adorned with a feathered headdress, along with some of his neck and shoulders. On the other side, an inscription written in hieroglyphics commemorates the monarch's 40-year reign.
A mysterious message has been found in an underground cave which turned out to house the remains of a Jewish ritual bath, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said Wednesday.
Found during construction work for a nursery in Jerusalem, the ritual bath, or mikve, dates to the first century A.D. and features walls treated with ancient plaster.
The head of Medusa, a Greek mythological creature who turned all that gazed upon her into stone, has been unearthed during excavations in the ancient city of Antiocheia Ad Cragum in the southern province of Antalya’s Gazipa?a district.
A massive gate unearthed in Israel may have marked the entrance to a biblical city that, at its heyday, was the biggest metropolis in the region.
The town, called Gath, was occupied until the ninth century B.C. In biblical accounts, the Philistines — the mortal enemies of the Israelites — ruled the city. The Old Testament also describes Gath as the home of Goliath, the giant warrior whom the Israelite King David felled with a slingshot.
A new expedition to the Ukok plateau, some 2,500 metres high in the Altai Mountains close to the modern-day Russian border with Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan, has found evidence that a set of intriguing petroglyphs are far older than previously thought.
Stylistically, the drawings match the Paleolithic era, some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. If this is true, they will be the oldest in Siberia by several millennia.
The fossilized remains of an ancient marine reptile with an extremely long neck and paddlelike appendages were recently uncovered in an unlikely place: the side of a cliff in Alaska.
Ancient mammal-like reptiles that once grazed across the globe may have possessed many of the fighting tactics seen in modern herbivores, including head butting and attacks with giant fangs, researchers say.
An unknown animal is killing chicken by the hundreds in villages of Russia’s Voronezh Region. Frustrated poultry farmers claim that the beast is killing everything it can get, yet the ripped-apart chicken carcasses have suspiciously little blood on them.
The week of carnage in the village of Davydovka began July 23, when an unknown animal killed 95 chickens of the Golubev family household. The next day the killer visited henhouses at two other households, killing 45 and 55 hens, respectively.
A small town in north Wales has appointed its first resident jester for over 700 years, naming him in an elaborate medieval ceremony.
Russel Erwood was officially dubbed Erwyd le Fol (French for ‘fool’) during an event in the main square in Conwy on Sunday which included falconry, knights and a parade.
People in Britain should boost their vitamin D intake with supplements because of a lack of bright sunshine to provide it naturally, government health advisers have suggested.
For consumers searching for just the right sunblock this summer, the options can be overwhelming. But scientists are now turning to the natural sunscreen of algae—which is also found in fish slime—to make a novel kind of shield against the sun's rays that could protect not only people, but also textiles and outdoor materials.
Two years after physicists predicted that tin should be able to form a mesh just one atom thick, researchers say that they have made it. The thin film, called stanene, is reported on 3 August in Nature Materials.
Last month, Japanese auto manufacturer Lexus unveiled its newest product, and it's not another luxury SUV. It's a hoverboard.
Related: The Lexus Hoverboard Is Real And I Rode It
A 58-year-old woman named Carmen Torres has become the first person in the US state of Florida to have a bionic eye installed. The device has already allowed her to see light and basic shapes for the first time in 13 years, and with further training she'll be able to view the world in even more detail.
In a world first, the US Food and Drug Administration has given the go-ahead for a 3D-printed pill to be produced.
The FDA has previously approved medical devices - including prosthetics - that have been 3D printed.
Soylent, the oddly named meal replacement with a niche following (particularly in the Valley) has announced its second product this morning: Soylent 2.0, which comes ready to drink in recyclable bottles. Each bottle represents one-fifth of a daily meal plan. Twelve bottles will sell for $29 when they go on sale in October; preorders go live today. Just like the original, it'll only be sold online, at least for the moment
In 2013, the world’s first lab-grown burger was unveiled to the world. It carried a $330,000 price tag, and apparently, it wasn’t all that tasty. But the scientists behind the idea have been hard at work, and artificial meat that’s both cost-effective and palatable may arrive sooner than we think.
Two chimpanzees will continue being held at a Long Island university research lab after a New York judge declined to grant them a writ of habeas corpus. New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe spun heads in April when she ordered litigation on whether Hercules and Leo had the right to challenge whether they were being unlawfully deprived of their liberty.
There’s an idea circulating that humans are the only animal to experience sexual pleasure; that we approach sex in a way that is distinct from others. As with many questions about sex, this exposes some interesting facts about the way we discuss the subject.
Just how much monkey business is there in monkey sex? In groups with alpha males, monkeys lower on the totem pole may have to sneak around to mate. How well they conceal their activities can shed light on the cognitive powers of primates.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham, UK and the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, have found that wild bonobos, our closest living relatives in the primate world, communicate in a similar manner to human infants, using a high-pitched call type, or 'peep', that requires context to be understood.
The more than 200 species in the family Mormyridae communicate with one another in a way completely alien to our species: by means of electric discharges generated by an organ in their tails.
Dogs have a specialized region in their brains for processing faces, a new study finds. PeerJ is publishing the research, which provides the first evidence for a face-selective region in the temporal cortex of dogs.
If you were to look up when walking through a forest in Japan, you might see “Kuma-dana,” or “bear shelves,” high in the trees. These patches of broken branches and dead leaves are created by Japanese black bears when they climb high to find fruit. That’s why climbing a tree won’t save you from a Japanese black bear.
All plants contain toxins which continue to work after leaf fall, so how worms are able to stomach dead grass and leaf litter has long been a mystery
A series of experiments has produced incredible results by giving young blood to old mice. Now the findings are being tested on humans.
“This could be big,” said Wyss-Coray. “If an old mouse starts to make more neurons when you give it young blood? That is amazing.”
Can our beliefs, motivations and emotions influence our visual perception? Are cognition and perception ultimately inseparable?
A lot of recent psychological research says “yes” to the question. For instance, it has been claimed that carrying a heavy backpack makes a hill look – not just feel – steeper. Other researchers say that feeling sad makes things seem darker – not just metaphorically, but literally.
Perfectionistic concerns have a positive relationship with overall burnout and symptoms of burnout, research has found. Perfectionistic concerns can create stress, interfere with relationships and more.
Scientists show for first time that sleep makes it easier to retrieve nuggets of information that may have got lost in a corner of the brain
Related: Scientists identify that memories can be lost and found
We know that genes play a role in how well children do in school, but there are gaps in our knowledge: is this the same for different topics in school? And can this be explained largely by intelligence, or do other genetic factors contribute?
Forget the insult “fathead.” We may actually owe our extraordinary smarts to the fat in our brain. A study published in Neuron in February revealed that the variety of fat molecules found in the human neocortex, the brain region responsible for advanced cognitive functions such as language, evolved at an exceptionally fast rate after the human-ape split.
The term pygmy usually refers to a few groups of short-statured people in equatorial rain forest regions in Africa. The existence of distinct populations of such people presented scientists with the opportunity to study the mechanisms by which typical human growth patterns have become altered there. And they discovered that two groups became small in two different ways.
At high altitudes, the reduced oxygen in the air makes some people develop a condition called hypoxia. But the thousands of people who live 3,500 meters above sea level in the Ethiopian highlands don’t seem to get sick.
Have you ever wondered why you say “The boy is playing Frisbee with his dog” instead of “The boy dog his is Frisbee playing with”? You may be trying to give your brain a break, according to a new study. An analysis of 37 widely varying tongues finds that, despite the apparent great differences among them, they share what might be a universal feature of human language: All of them have evolved to make communication as efficient as possible.
People of the future will need to learn to love their neighbors. The latest predictions for population growth from the United Nations indicate the Earth will be more crowded than previously thought.
The global population is currently about 7.3 billion.
If you’re constantly bundling up against your office building’s air conditioning, blame Povl Ole Fanger. In the 1960s, this Danish scientist developed a model, still used in many office buildings around the world, which predicts comfortable indoor temperatures for the average worker. The problem? The average office worker in the 1960s was a 40-year-old man sporting a three-piece suit.
Related: Is Air Conditioning Killing the Planet?
“Did you see the movie Deep Impact?”
Yes, I did, I tell David Morrison, the chief scientist for the Planetary Defense Team at NASA's Ames Research Center. That’s the 1998 film where astronauts pilot a spacecraft carrying nuclear weapons into the center of a massive comet, destroying the threat moments before it hits Earth.
So-called "mystery booms" that have puzzled residents in California's Gold Country appear to be coming from a U.S. military installation over 100 miles away in the Nevada desert.
There has been a lot of publicity for the original news stories. Headlines such as 'Impossible' rocket drive works and could get to Moon in four hours. And a lot stories debunking it, headlines such as How to fool the world with bad science” Starts With A Bang!
But after the initial dramatic news stories about the device, and these stories debunking them with sometimes well known scientists debunking the experiments, you get a final wave of news stories debunking the debunkers. I think it is worth looking at these also, they deserve more publicity than they got.
New Mexico State University researchers are part of a team of scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) who created a new map of the Milky Way that shows nearly a third of the stars have dramatically changed their orbits
The huge rocket NASA is developing to get astronauts to an asteroid, Mars and other distant destinations should also greatly aid robotic exploration efforts, members of Congress were told Tuesday (July 28).
The Philae lander, after successfully landing on a comet in late 2014, may have made a significant discovery about the ingredients which create life.
When an asteroid packed with about $5 trillion worth of platinum zoomed past Earth this month scientists were ready, capturing the space rock on radar as it sailed safely by our planet.