The NROL-145 mission lifted off Sunday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 8:29 a.m. Eastern.

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By understanding the churning region near singularities, physicists hope they might be able to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.

China sent six experimental Shiyan series satellites into orbit late Friday Eastern, using its Long March 6A rocket launched from Taiyuan.

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Learn why some dinosaurs had air sacs in their vertebrae and how it relates to modern day birds.

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More states are lining up in a bid to host NASA’s headquarters, but the prize they seek may turn out to be smaller than they expect.

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In the Senate hearing considering the confirmation of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator, he and Senator Ted Cruz engaged in extensive dialogue about China. They strongly expressed the view that […]

The post Moon, Mars — China leads to both appeared first on SpaceNews.

Learn how following a plant-based diet could help you live longer.

A few years ago, I wrote in Physics World about various bizarre structures I’d built from tennis balls, the most peculiar of which I termed “tennis-ball towers”. They consisted of a series of three-ball layers topped by a single ball (“the locker”) that keeps the whole tower intact. Each tower had (3n + 1) balls, where n is the number of triangular layers. The tallest tower I made was a seven-storey, 19-ball structure (n = 6). Shortly afterwards, I made an even bigger, nine-storey, 25-ball structure (n = 8).

Now, in the latest exciting development, I have built a new, record-breaking tower with 34 balls (n = 11), in which all 30 balls from the second to the eleventh layer are kept in equilibrium by the locker on the top (see photo a). The three balls in the bottom layer aren’t influenced by the locker as they stay in place by virtue of being on the horizontal surface of a table.

I tried going even higher but failed to build a structure that would stay intact without supporting “scaffolds”. Now in case you think I’ve just glued the balls together, watch the video below to see how the incredible 34-ball structure collapses spontaneously, probably due to a slight vibration as I walked around the table.

Even more unexpectedly, I have been able to make tennis-ball towers consisting of layers of four balls (4n + 1) and five balls too (5n + 1). Their equilibria are more delicate and, in the case of four-ball structures, so far I have only managed to build (photo b) a 21-ball, six-storey tower (n = 5). You can also see the tower in the video below.

The (5n + 1) towers are even trickier to make and (photo c) I have only got up to a three-storey structure with 11 balls (n = 2): two lots of five balls with a sixth single ball on top. In case you’re wondering, towers with six balls in each layer are physically impossible to build because they form a regular hexagon. You can’t just use another ball as a locker because it would simply sit between the other six (photo d).

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Members of a NASA safety panel said they were “deeply concerned” about the safety of the aging International Space Station, citing long-running issues and funding shortfalls.

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Even as NASA and its partners on the ISS shift to commercial space stations, NASA’s former deputy administrator believes there will still be a role for multilateral coordination.

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While cautious about the findings, astronomers detected traces of a chemical that, on Earth, is produced by phytoplankton.