science
South Asia's intense heat wave a 'sign of things to come'
The devastating heat wave that has baked India and Pakistan in recent months was made more likely by climate change and is a glimpse of the region's future, international scientists said in a study released Monday.
The World Weather Attribution group analyzed historical weather data that suggested early, long heat waves that impact a massive geographical area are rare, once-a-century events. But the current level of global warming, caused by human-caused climate change, has made those heat waves 30 times more likely.
If global heating increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than pre-industrial levels, then heat waves like this could occur twice in a century and up to once every five years, said Arpita Mondal, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, who was part of the study.
Also read: Delhi suffers at 49C as heatwave sweeps India
“This is a sign of things to come,” Mondal said.
The results are conservative: An analysis published last week by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office said the heat wave was probably made 100 times more likely by climate change, with such scorching temperatures likely to reoccur every three years.
The World Weather Attribution analysis is different as it is trying to calculate how specific aspects of the heat wave, such as the length and the region impacted, were made more likely by global warming. “The real result is probably somewhere between ours and the (U.K.) Met Office result for how much climate change increased this event,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London, who was also a part of the study.
What is certain, though, is the devastation the heat wave has wreaked. India sweltered through the hottest March in the country since records began in 1901 and April was the warmest on record in Pakistan and parts of India. The effects have been cascading and widespread: A glacier burst in Pakistan, sending floods downstream; the early heat scorched wheat crops in India, forcing it to ban exports to nations reeling from food shortages due to Russia’s war in Ukraine; it also resulted in an early spike in electricity demand in India that depleted coal reserves, resulting in acute power shortages affecting millions.
Then there is the impact on human health. At least 90 people have died in the two nations, but the region’s insufficient death registration means that this is likely an undercount. South Asia is the most affected by heat stress, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of a dataset published Columbia University’s climate school. India alone is home to more than a third of the world’s population that lives in areas where extreme heat is rising.
Experts agree the heat wave underscores the need for the world to not just combat climate change by cutting down greenhouse gas emissions, but to also adapt to its harmful impacts as quickly as possible. Children and the elderly are most at risk from heat stress, but its impact is also inordinately bigger for the poor who may not have access to cooling or water and often live in crowded slums that are hotter than leafier, wealthier neighborhoods.
Rahman Ali, 42, a ragpicker in an eastern suburb of the Indian capital New Delhi earns less than $3 a day by collecting waste from people’s homes and sorting it to salvage whatever can be sold. It's backbreaking work and his tin-roofed home in the crowded slum offers little respite from the heat.
“What can we do? If I don’t work...we won’t eat,” said the father of two.
Some Indian cities have tried to find solutions. The western city of Ahmedabad was the first in South Asia to design a heat wave plan for its population of over 8.4 million, all the way back in 2013. The plan includes an early warning system that tells health workers and residents to prepare for heat waves, empowers administrations to keep parks open so that people can shade and provides information to schools so they're able to tweak their schedules.
Also read: Earth given 50-50 chance of hitting key warming mark by 2026
The city has also been trying to “cool” roofs by experimenting with various materials absorb heat differently. Their aim is to build roofs that’ll reflect the sun and bring down indoor temperatures by using white, reflective paint or cheaper materials like dried grass, said Dr. Dileep Mavalankar, who heads the Indian Institute of Public Health in western Indian city Gandhinagar and helped design the 2013 plan.
Most Indian cities are less prepared and India’s federal government is now working with 130 cities in 23 heat wave-prone states for them to develop similar plans. Earlier this month, the federal government also asked states to sensitize health workers on managing heat-related illnesses and ensure that ice packs, oral rehydration salts, and cooling appliances in hospitals were available.
But Mavalankar, who wasn't part of the study, pointed to the lack of government warnings in newspapers or TV for most Indian cities and said that local administrations had just not “woken up to the heat.”
Astronomers capture 1st image of Milky Way's huge black hole
The world's first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant" on a near-starvation diet.
Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.
The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Getting a good image was a challenge; previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy.
"It burbled and gurgled as we looked at it," the University of Arizona's Feryal Ozel said.
She described it as a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough along with other astronomers involved in the project. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein's equations dictate. It is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun.
Black holes gobble up galactic material but Ozel said this one is “eating very little.” It's the equivalent to a person eating a single grain of rice over millions of years, another astronomer said.
Also read: Earth given 50-50 chance of hitting key warming mark by 2026
“Pictures of black holes are the hardest thing to think about,” said astronomer Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles. She wasn't part of the telescope team bu t earned a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Milky Way's black hole in the 1990s.
She said the image of “my baby” is exactly how it should be — an eerie-looking orange-red ring with utter blackness in the middle.
Scientists had expected the Milky Way's black hole to be more violent, especially since the only other image from another galaxy shows a far bigger and more active black hole.
“It is the cowardly lion of black holes,” said project scientist Geoffrey C. Bower of Taiwan's Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Because the black hole “is on a starvation diet” so little material is falling into the center, and that allows astronomers to gaze deeper, Bower said.
The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A (with an asterisk denoting star). It's near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations and is 4 million times more massive than our sun. Bower said it is probably more typical of what’s at the center of most galaxies, “just sitting there doing very little.”
Also read: US astronaut ends record-long spaceflight in Russian capsule
It is incredibly hot, trillions of degrees, Ozel said.
The same telescope group released the first black hole image in 2019. The picture was from a galaxy 53 million light-years away that is 1,500 times bigger than the one in our galaxy. The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. A light year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers).
To get the picture, the eight telescopes had to coordinate so closely “in a process similar to everyone shaking hands with everyone else in the room,” said astronomer Vincent Fish of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Astronomers worked with data collected in 2017 to get the new images. The next step is a movie of one of those two black holes, maybe both, Fish said.
The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Even though it is quieter than expected, the center of the Milky Way is an important place to study, Ghez said.
It's "like an urban downtown, everything is more extreme. It's crowded. Things move fast,” Ghez said in an interview. “We live out in the suburbs (in a spiral arm of the galaxy). Things are calm out here.”
Earth given 50-50 chance of hitting key warming mark by 2026
The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted.
With human-made climate change continuing, there’s a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.
The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40% and a decade ago it was only 10%.
The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there's a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going.
Also read: Longest lightning bolt record: 477 miles over 3 US states
“We’re going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.
These forecasts are big picture global and regional climate predictions on a yearly and seasonal time scale based on long term averages and state of the art computer simulations. They are different than increasingly accurate weather forecasts that predict how hot or wet a certain day will be in specific places.
But even if the world hits that mark of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times — the globe has already warmed about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s — that’s not quite the same as the global threshold first set by international negotiators in the 2015 Paris agreement. In 2018, a major United Nations science report predicted dramatic and dangerous effects on people and the world if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees.
The global 1.5 degree threshold is about the world being that warm not for one year, but over a 20- or 30- year time period, several scientists said. This is not what the report predicts. Meteorologists can only tell if Earth hits that average mark years, maybe a decade or two, after it is actually reached there because it is a long term average, Hermanson said.
“This is a warning of what will be just average in a few years,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams.
The prediction makes sense given how warm the world already is and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) is expected because of human-caused climate change in the next five years, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams. Add to that the likelihood of a strong El Nino — the natural periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that alter world weather — which could toss another couple tenths of a degree on top temporarily and the world gets to 1.5 degrees.
The world is in the second straight year of a La Nina, the opposite of El Nino, which has a slight global cooling effect but isn’t enough to counter the overall warming of heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said. The five-year forecast says that La Nina is likely to end late this year or in 2023.
The greenhouse effect from fossil fuels is like putting global temperatures on a rising escalator. El Nino, La Nina and a handful of other natural weather variations are like taking steps up or down on that escalator, scientists said.
On a regional scale, the Arctic will still be warming during the winter at rate three times more than the globe on average. While the American Southwest and southwestern Europe are likely to be drier than normal the next five years, wetter than normal conditions are expected for Africa’s often arid Sahel region, northern Europe, northeast Brazil and Australia, the report predicted.
Also read: Rare, pristine coral reef found off Tahiti coast
The global team has been making these predictions informally for a decade and formally for about five years, with greater than 90% accuracy, Hermanson said.
NASA top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said the figures in this report are “a little warmer” than what the U.S. NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration use. He also had doubts about skill level on long-term regional predictions.
“Regardless of what is predicted here, we are very likely to exceed 1.5 degrees C in the next decade or so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are committed to this in the long term — or that working to reduce further change is not worthwhile,” Schmidt said in an email.
Best Free Data Science, Machine Learning Courses Online
Data science and machine learning have been the buzzword in the tech world for quite some time. The prospect of working with data, making clear and concise decisions, and a high payout career may seem lucrative to anyone. However, it’s not possible to become an expert in this field that easily. There are a lot of basics like statistics, programming, and analytics to cover before getting a hang of things. If all of these seem a bit too overwhelming, there are a few great foundation courses on data science and ML to get started from scratch. Check out which one best fits your needs.
Why Should You Learn Data Science and ML?
Let us ask you this, why shouldn’t you? Data science and ML holds the highest job prospect in the coming years. In fact, there are currently over 200,000 data science and ML-related jobs on LinkedIn alone. Industry leaders predict that the need for data scientists will increase by over 26% in the next 5 years. And the growth is expected to be exponential from thereon. While there are a lot of jobs at risk of becoming invalid due to automation and AI, the need for data science majors will forever be on the rise.
And if the job security wasn’t enough to generate interest, the general median salary for a data science major in the USA is around 110,000 USD which roughly translates to 95,08,182 BDT per year. Did that grab your attention? Read along about how you can get started in your data science and ML journey.
Read How to Be a Data Analyst from CSE or Non-CSE Backgrounds?
Top 9 Free Beginner’s Courses to Learn Data Science and ML
Data Science Specialization – Coursera
This course is offered by Coursera in association with John Hopkins University. The free course is a mid-tier one designed for people who already have a grasp of the basics of statistics and R. The course will follow a detailed guide on using R to clean and sift data, manage projects and publish using Github, and data acquisition. It will also entail detailed regression analysis procedures using different regression models. The approximate course duration is about 11 months.
Introduction to Machine Learning – Udacity
Machine learning is almost as complicated as its name. It combines two significantly difficult disciplines – computer science and statistics to deliver a powerful predictive mechanism that makes up the base for modern data science.
This intermediate-level course will introduce the students to the machine learning lens, data extraction process, and predictive algorithms. The approximate course duration is 10 weeks.
Read Free Online Basic Programming Courses for Beginners
Data Science Fundamentals – IBM
Who better to learn data science from than the company that made the first computer? This beginner-level course is provided by IBM in association with Cognitive Class. The main aim of this course is to initiate the students with the very basics of data, its processes, life cycle, usage, and application.
This course is part of a series of foundation courses that gradually progresses to intermediate and advanced levels. Students will also learn about different open-source data management tools. The approximate duration of the course is 10 weeks.
Introduction to Data Science – Metis
This course is a free introductory step to the data science boot camp offered by Metis. It is a small course that will be useful for beginners trying to get their head around data science. Students don't necessarily have to participate in the Bootcamp afterward, rather it’s a stepping stone to the world of data analytics.
The 5-week-long course will see students learn about data cleaning, model creation, validation, and visualization.
Read What is the Best Programming Language to Learn First?
Machine Learning with Python – Coursera
This Coursera course is supervised by IBM and is part of a series of machine learning levels. This is a beginner course that follows the integration of the commonly used programming language Python with ML.
Students will learn about model evaluation, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and different ML algorithms. The course will take approximately 22 hours to complete.
Applied Data Science with Python Specialization – Coursera
This applied data science course is fulfilled by the University of Michigan. This is an intermediate-level course with the main focus on the application end. Students wishing to get the basics first can check out the other 4 parts of this concurrent course.
This specific course will focus on inferential statistical analysis and its implications, applied ML algorithms, and how to interpret results. The course will also focus on different data visualization techniques. The approximate course duration is 5 months.
Read Game-based Programming: Best Coding Games for Children
Data Quest
Data Quest is an online platform that is all about data science and ML. But instead of the regular courses, the platform takes a more innovative approach to data science.
Instead of having video lectures that guide the students first, the data quest starts with projects. While it may seem daunting at first, the interactive nature of the project and clear guidelines makes it easy for anyone to pick up the quirks. There are all sorts of resources available for free including paid plans.
Data Science for Everyone – DataCamp
This course is pretty much like its name. It’s a completely non-technical course focusing on the very basics of data science for absolute beginners. It starts by addressing what data science is and how it can be incorporated into modern jobs or how it benefits the big techs. It also gives an idea about how probability is related to computation and ML predictions. There aren’t any technicalities here so anyone can have a go-to to see whether data science is actually for them or not.
Read How to Get a Job in Google from Bangladesh?
Learn Data Science with R – Udemy
The main basis of data science is made up of probability and machine learning. While ML mainly works with Python, data scientists need in-depth knowledge about R to get started with probability and regression model formation.
This 10-part series from Udemy takes the students from the basics to the intermediate level of using R for data science. The course doesn’t connect the detailed dots with data management, but the students will learn much about sourcing and cleaning data for model applications.
Final Words
So far, we have shared 10 open source online courses for learning data science, data analytics and machine learning. Many people get attracted to data science just because of all the noise and prospects around it. But in reality, it's not everyone's cup of tea. But should that stop people from having a go at it? Absolutely not. Instead, these courses are a great starting point to see whether data science and ML match your passion and skill set and whether they can be a long-term career choice.
Read Top 10 In-demand Tech Skills Freshers Should Learn in 2022
US military oks prototype mobile nuclear reactor in Idaho
The U.S. Department of Defense plans to build an advanced mobile nuclear microreactor prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho.
The department late last week signed off on the Project Pele plan to build the reactor and reactor fuel outside of Idaho and then assemble and operate the reactor at the lab.
The decision follows a two-volume, 600-page environmental impact statement that includes public comments evaluating alternatives for building and operating a gas-cooled microreactor that could produce 1 to 5 megawatts of power.
“Advanced nuclear power has the potential to be a strategic game-changer for the United States, both for the (Department of Defense) and for the commercial sector,” said Jeff Waksman, program manager for Project Pele. “For it to be adopted, it must first be successfully demonstrated under real-world operating conditions.”
Also Read: Powerful US nuclear test reactor getting rare major overhaul
Officials had previously said preparing testing sites at the Idaho National Lab and then building and testing the microreactor would take about three years. The department said the project is subject to the availability of appropriations.
The department said two reactor designs are being considered, and one chosen will be announced later. The department said both designs are high-temperature gas-cooled reactors using enriched uranium for fuel.
If the project goes forward, officials said it would be the first Generation IV nuclear reactor to operate in the United States. The Defense Department said the first electricity-generating Generation IV reactor was a Chinese reactor that started up last September.
The department said it uses 30 terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons (37.9 million liters) of fuel per day, and it expects energy demands to increase with a transition to an electrical, non-tactical vehicle fleet. Thirty terawatt-hours is more energy than many small countries use in a year.
Critics of the military using small, mobile nuclear reactors have said they could pose more logistical problems and risks to troops than they solve. Another concern is that nuclear reactors in potential combat zones or foreign operating bases could become targets themselves.
Also Read: Navy captain becomes 1st woman to command US nuclear carrier
The Idaho National Laboratory is on the U.S. Department of Energy’s 890-square-mile (2,305-square-kilometer) site in high desert sagebrush steppe, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Idaho Falls. All prototype reactor testing would take place on the Energy Department site. The lab has multiple facilities to aid in building and testing the microreactor.
That demonstration of the reactor would include startup testing, moving the reactor to a new site, and testing at the second location. The second location would mimic a real-world situation by testing the reactor’s ability to respond to energy demands.
Fuel leak thwarts NASA's dress rehearsal for moon rocket
NASA's latest attempt to fuel its huge moon rocket for a countdown test was thwarted Thursday by a hazardous hydrogen leak, the latest in a series of vexing equipment trouble.
The launch team had just begun loading fuel into the core stage of the rocket when the leak cropped up. This was NASA's third shot at a dress rehearsal, a required step ahead of a test flight to the moon.
This time, the launch team managed to load some super-cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen into the core stage of the 30-story Space Launch System rocket, but fell far short of the full amount. Liquid hydrogen is extremely hazardous, with officials noting that the systems had been checked for leaks prior to the test.
Also read: China launches new satellite for Earth observation
Technicians deliberately left the smaller upper stage empty, after discovering a bad valve last week. The helium valve inside the upper stage cannot be replaced until the rocket is back in its hangar at Kennedy Space Center.
Two previous countdown attempts were marred by balky fans and a large hand-operated valve that workers mistakenly left closed at the pad last week.
Officials said via Twitter that they're assessing their next steps.
Also read: Researchers print 3D cardiac tissue capable of sustaining pulses for over 6 months
NASA had been targeting June for the launch debut of the 322-foot (98-meter) SLS rocket. The empty Orion capsule on top will be sent on a four- to six-week mission around the moon and back.
Astronauts will strap in for the second test flight around the moon, planned for 2024. That would be followed as early as 2025 with the first lunar landing by astronauts since 1972. NASA plans to announce the crews for these two missions this summer.
China launches new satellite for Earth observation
China launched a new Earth observation satellite from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Thursday.
The satellite, Gaofen-3 03, was launched by a Long March-4C rocket at 7:47 a.m. (Beijing Time) and has entered the planned orbit successfully.
The satellite will be networked with the orbiting Gaofen-3 and Gaofen-3 02 satellites to form a land-sea radar satellite constellation and capture reliable, stable synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images.
Also Read: Weather satellite rockets to orbit to monitor US West
These images will boast a 1-meter resolution together with a one-day revisit period, thereby improving the monitoring capabilities of China's land-sea radar satellites.
It will serve the fields of marine disaster prevention and mitigation, dynamic marine environment monitoring, marine research, environmental protection, water conservancy, agriculture and meteorology, while helping to safeguard maritime rights and interests.
The launch marks the 414th mission for the Long March series carrier rockets.
Also Read: North Korea says it tested cameras for spy satellite
Researchers print 3D cardiac tissue capable of sustaining pulses for over 6 months
Chinese researchers and their counterparts from British and Dutch universities have worked together to print a cardiac tissue that can survive in vitro and sustain pulses for more than six months.
3D bioprinting has demonstrated its advantages as one of the major methods in fabricating simple tissues, yet it still faces difficulties to generate vasculatures and preserve cell functions in complex organ production.
The researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, the University of Manchester and Delft University of Technology overcame the limitations of conventional bioprinting systems by converting a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm into a bioprinter, thus enabling cell printing on 3D complex-shaped vascular scaffolds from all directions.
The research article, recently published in the journal Bioactive Materials, stated that several layers of cells were printed on the scaffold and were co-cultured for a period of time to induce the formation of functional intercellular junctions and new capillaries between the printed cells. Thereafter, a new round of cell printing was carried out.
READ: Covid-19 affects brain tissue, memory, language: Study
The process can form a vascular network similar to the internal organs and support the long-term survival of the printed tissue and organs.
The researchers also developed an oil bath-based cell printing method to better preserve the natural functions of cells after printing. Together with a self-designed bioreactor and a repeated print-and-culture strategy, the bioprinting system is capable of generating vascularized, contractible, and long-term survived cardiac tissues.
Such bioprinting strategy mimics the in vivo organ development process and presents a promising solution for in vitro fabrication of complex organs, according to the research article.
US astronaut ends record-long spaceflight in Russian capsule
A NASA astronaut caught a Russian ride back to Earth on Wednesday after a U.S. record 355 days at the International Space Station, returning with two cosmonauts to a world torn apart by war.
Mark Vande Hei landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan alongside the Russian Space Agency’s Pyotr Dubrov, who also spent the past year in space, and Anton Shkaplerov. Wind blew the capsule onto its side following touchdown, and the trio emerged into the late afternoon sun one by one.
Read:Longest lightning bolt record: 477 miles over 3 US states
Vande Hei, the last one out, grinned and waved as he was carried to a reclining chair out in the open Kazakh steppes.
“Beautiful out here,” said Vande Hei, putting on a face mask and ballcap.
Despite escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia over Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine, Vande Hei’s return followed customary procedures. A small NASA team of doctors and other staff was on hand for the touchdown and planned to return immediately to Houston with the 55-year-old astronaut.
Even before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Vande Hei said he was avoiding the subject with his two Russian crewmates. Despite getting along “fantastically ... I’m not sure we really want to go there,” he said.
It was the first taste of gravity for Vande Hei and Dubrov since their Soyuz launch on April 9 last year. Shkaplerov joined them at the orbiting lab in October, escorting a Russian film crew up for a brief stay. To accommodate that visit, Vande Hei and Dubrov doubled the length of their stay.
Before departing the space station, Shkaplerov embraced his fellow astronauts as “my space brothers and space sister.”
“People have problem on Earth. On orbit ... we are one crew,” Shkaplerov said in a live NASA TV broadcast Tuesday. The space station is a symbol of “friendship and cooperation and ... future of exploration of space.”
The war tensions bubbled over in other areas of space with the suspension of European satellite launches on Russian rockets and the Europe-Russia Mars rover stuck on Earth for another two years.
Read:Meet the man who won a trip to space and gave it to a friend
Vande Hei surpassed NASA’s previous record for the longest single spaceflight by 15 days. Dubrov moved into Russia’s top five, well short of the 437-day, 17-hour marathon by a cosmonaut-physician aboard the 1990s Mir space station that remains the world record.
“Broken records mean we’re making progress,” said NASA’s previous space endurance champ, retired astronaut Scott Kelly, whose 340-day mission ended in 2016.
Like Kelly, Vande Hei underwent medical testing during his long stay to further NASA’s quest to get astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars. He said daily meditation helped him cope during the mission, twice as long as his first station stint four years earlier.
“I’ve had an indoor job 24-7 for almost a year so I am looking forward to being outside no matter what kind of weather,” Vande Hei said in a recent series of NASA videos. As for food, he’s looking forward to making a cup of coffee for himself and wife Julie, and digging into guacamole and chips.
Remaining on board: Three Russians who arrived two weeks ago and three Americans and one German, who have been aboard since November. Their replacements are due in three weeks via SpaceX. Next week, SpaceX will fly three rich businessmen and their ex-astronaut escort to the station for a weeklong visit arranged by the private Axiom Space.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX began transporting NASA astronauts to the station in 2020, nine years after the shuttle program ended. During that gap, Russia offered the lone taxi service, with NASA shelling out tens of millions of dollars per Soyuz seat. Vande Hei’s ride was part of a barter exchange with Houston-based Axiom.
10 Greatest Female Scientists of All Time
If you are asked who are the greatest scientists of all time? Probably your answer will be Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, or other big names. No doubt those scientists made remarkable discoveries and changed how we understand the world. But women have played a key role in humanity’s scientific advancement though they have faced systemic barriers and gender discrimination throughout history. Let's learn about women's accomplishments and celebrate their scientific achievements in this March-Women's History month.
10 Pioneering Women of History in Science
Ada Lovelace (Dec. 10, 1815-Nov. 27, 1852), Mathematician
Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer. She was the only child of poet Lord Byron and mathematician Lady Byron and was born in England. Her father separated from her mother after a few months of her birth.