‘That man died a hero’: Pa. trooper killed by tractor-trailer during commercial vehicle inspection

Trooper Michael Pahira, a nearly 20-year law enforcement, was assisting with a commercial vehicle inspection when he was fatally struck by an out-of-control truck

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BWC: Ill. officer, traffic stop subject wrestle over gun before fatal OIS

After more than a minute of a physical altercation over the gun, the man appeared to break away with the gun before the Oak Park Police officer fired multiple shots

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Nautilus array to track missing exoplanet atmospheres

Exoplanet atmospheres have become prime targets for astrobiologists in the search for life beyond Earth. This is because exoplanet surfaces can’t be directly imaged yet, so astronomers must get creative in how they search for signs of life, also called biosignatures. Presently, powerful ground- and space-based telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and […]

TESS just found a planet in a new way—and more may be hiding in its eight years of data

For the first time, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a distant star thanks to its warping of space-time. Unlike the star-hugging transiting planets TESS regularly reveals, the newfound microlensing world is a super-Jupiter orbiting far from its host star.

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A new CRASH clock measures the chance of satellite collisions, and it’s ticking down fast

Imagine a piece of space debris the size of a hockey puck slams into a Starlink satellite at about 10 kilometers per second. The kinetic energy is equivalent to 2 kilograms of TNT, or a fully loaded semitruck traveling at 100 kilometers an hour.

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XMM-Newton and Chandra help revise distance to Milky Way’s outer spiral arms

The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they found the outer arms to be up to 10% farther away than previously thought.

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13,000 tons of space junk clutters Earth orbit. Here’s how it could be cleaned up

Seventy years ago, Earth had only one satellite: the moon. Now it has more than 15,000—about 10,000 of which are owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The world’s first trillionaire plans to launch 1 million more satellites, each roughly 70 meters (230 feet) long and 20 meters (66 feet) wide, that would form a data center […]

The universe is less uniform than we thought—cosmology may need a radical rethink

Modern cosmology rests on a simple assumption: If we look on large enough scales, matter should be distributed evenly, with no preferred direction within the cosmos. This is known as the cosmological principle.

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BWC: Okla. K-9 dragged by suspect fleeing in truck

Oklahoma City Police K-9 Dash grabbed onto a fleeing suspect’s leg; the suspect then began to drive away, dragging the K-9 “a significant distance down the road”

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Martian dust storms may generate atmospheric electrical conditions that could impact future missions

A new study by a doctoral researcher at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), part of The University of Alabama System, suggests global dust storms on Mars may organize the Martian atmosphere into regions favorable for electrical activity, increasing the potential for electrostatic discharges that could affect missions to the red planet by interfering […]

Orbit overload could devastate astronomy if 1.7 million proposed satellites brighten night sky

A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch more than 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have “devastating consequences for astronomy.” According to the study, no more than 100,000 faint satellites, below naked-eye visibility, should orbit Earth to safeguard our ability to observe the night […]

ESA outlines high-tech lander instruments for 2050 Enceladus

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has become a prime solar system target for astrobiologists. This is because the small moon, which is just over 10% the diameter of Earth’s moon, harbors a vast subsurface ocean beneath its icy crust. This subsurface ocean, combined with the geysers at Enceladus’ south pole that discharge bits of this ocean into […]

Prosecutors won’t file charges against 2 drivers in collisions that killed Wash. trooper

Pierce County prosecutors stated they could not definitively prove that the first driver acted with negligence or that the second driver knew they struck Trooper Tara-Marysa Guting

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How a giant planet survived its star’s death, then migrated inward

When astronomers discovered a giant planet orbiting a dead star in 2020, they wondered how it survived its star’s violent demise. Now, observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may finally explain the planet’s unlikely escape from destruction.

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From fields to space farming, new tool detects crop drought stress before it’s visible

When it comes to drought stress, timing can be the difference between saving a crop and losing it, whether in a greenhouse or in the high-stakes environment of future space missions. In a recent study published in Plant Phenomics, researchers with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS), the United States […]