In 4 billion years our galaxy the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda; NASA created this animation of what the collision and eventual merger will look like.

Gene editing of human embryos yields early results
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Scientists have long sought a strategy for curing genetic diseases, but — with just a few notable exceptions — have succeeded only in their dreams. Now, though, researchers in China and Texas have taken a step toward making the fantasies a reality for all inherited diseases.

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Lost in Space: How Mars' Atmosphere Evaporated Away
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Mars may have once possessed an atmosphere about as thick as Earth's, but then lost most of it to space due to solar wind and ultraviolet rays, a new study found.

The new finding could shed light on the habitability of not just early Mars, but also distant worlds, researchers said.

Mars is currently a frigid desert world with extremely thin air. The atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface is on average only about one-hundredth to one-thousandth that on Earth at sea level. (In comparison, the atmospheric pressure at the highest point on Earth's surface, the top of Mount Everest, is about one-third that on Earth at sea level.)

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Scientists Have Detected an Unexplained Explosion Coming From a Galaxy 10.7 Billion Light-Years Away
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Scientists have taken the deepest X-ray image of our Universe to date - and within it, they've found evidence of a huge, unexplained explosion coming from a galaxy around 10.7 billion light-years away.

The galaxy itself appears to be fairly faint and unremarkable, but in October 2014, it suddenly became at least 1,000 times brighter over a few hours, before fading into oblivion again. No astronomical phenomenon that scientists currently know of can explain the behaviour.

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New Simulations Suggest Dark Energy Might Not Exist
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Ever since the late 1990s, physicists have been fairly certain that the Universe isn't only getting bigger, it also appears to be expanding at an ever increasing rate.

A mysterious force called dark energy is currently thought to be responsible for this accelerating growth, but a new study raises the possibility that what seems to be a type of energy could be an illusion caused by the changing structure of the Universe.

Physicists from Loránd University in Hungary and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii are now questioning if approximations in Einstein's equations introduced "serious side effects" that gave the illusion of a vast, unknown force pushing space apart.

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Falcon 9 launch of SES-10; the first re-flight of an orbital class rocket.
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It's a long ways down. This is a view from the vantage point of astronaut Shane Kimbrough during his spacewalk Friday outside the International Space Station.

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Tadpoles learn to see with new eyes transplanted on their tails
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Blind tadpoles have learned to see again, using eyes implanted on their tails. With help from a migraine drug, these eyes were able to grow new connections to the tadpole’s nervous system. The same approach may work in humans, allowing the body to integrate bioengineered organs, say the team behind the work.

“If a human had an eye implanted on their back connected to their spinal cord, would the human be able to see out of that eye? My guess is probably yes,” says Michael Levin, at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

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A Japanese Man Just Got Another Person's Stem Cells Transplanted in His Eye
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In what's reported to be a world-first, last Tuesday, a Japanese man received a pioneering retinal cell transplant grown from donor stem cells instead of his own.
Doctors took skin cells from a donor bank and reprogrammed them into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which can be coaxed to grow into most cell types in the body.

For this procedure, the physicians grew the iPS cells into a type of retinal cell, and then injected them into the retina of the patient's right eye.
The test subject was a man in his 60s who has been living with age-related macular degeneration - a currently incurable eye disease that slowly leads to loss of vision.

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Scientists are turning spinach leaves into heart tissue.

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Confirmed: Those Mysterious Radio Bursts Really Are Coming From Outer Space
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For almost a decade now, scientists have been trying to decode the origin of some of the most mysterious and explosive signals in the Universe - fast radio bursts (FRBs).

Lasting only milliseconds, these bursts of energy are about a billion times more luminous than anything we've ever seen in our own galaxy, and seem to be travelling across vast distances. But despite having detected more than 20 of them, scientists still aren't sure where they're coming from, or what causes them. Now researchers are one step closer by ruling out any source on Earth.

There are still several hypotheses out there that need to be ruled out before we can say for sure where FRBs do come from - perhaps the most bizarre one put forward by Harvard scientists last month is that the FRBs could actually be alien signals.

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Instagram - SES-10 Landing video
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Earth-sized telescope set to snap first picture of a black hole
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GET ready to peer into the unknown. This week, we will have our first chance to take a picture of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The image could teach us how black holes work and even how the largest and smallest forces governing the universe fit together.

The Event Horizon Telescope is switching on. It consists of eight radio observatories around the world, including telescopes in Spain, the US and Antarctica (see map). And for just four or five nights between 5 and 14 April, if the weather is clear at all of the observatories, they will all turn on at once.

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Discovery! Atmosphere Spotted on Nearly Earth-Size Exoplanet
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For the first time, scientists have detected an atmosphere around a planet beyond our solar system that's just a little bit larger than Earth.

The exoplanet GJ 1132b, which orbits the dwarf star GJ 1132, is located about 39 light-years away from Earth. It has a radius about 1.4 times that of Earth and is 1.6 times Earth's mass, according to the new study. When the planet was first discovered, researchers called it a potential Venus twin because it's a rocky world with a very high surface temperature — and now, they've found that the planet and Venus might have a thick atmosphere in common, too (although it would have a different composition).

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Cassini: The Grand Finale

Almost 20 years ago, the Cassini orbiter began its 2.2 billion mile journey to Saturn with a liftoff at Cape Canaveral. It then spent 7 years in the cold vacuum of space as it journeyed through the solar system; and on Thursday, July 1, 2004 it became the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn.

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Scientists Have Found a New Way to Get Cancer Cells to Self-Destruct

A newly discovered mechanism causes cancerous cells to kill themselves off, and researchers say it could be particularly effective for aggressive forms of the disease, such as pancreatic cancer.

Once the process is activated by modifying specific proteins inside cancerous tissue, the relentless division that drives the disease is drawn to a halt, causing cancer cells to die off rather than spreading throughout the body. And unlike current cancer treatments, this technique leaves the healthy cells alone.

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Nasa to hold major press conference on 'ocean worlds' in our solar system

Nasa will hold a major press conference on ocean worlds in our own solar system, it has said.

The agency will reveal results that will inform the “broader search for life beyond Earth” at the mysterious event.

They will also affect plans for “future ocean world exploration”, Nasa said.

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Astronomers Might Have Just Captured the First Ever Photo of a Black Hole's Event Horizon

Scientists around the world have spent five sleepless nights staring into the abyss, and are hoping they've been rewarded with something that could change physics forever - the first photo of the event horizon at the edge of a black hole.

If their efforts were successful, we might be on the verge of actually seeing the edge of an elusive black hole, allowing us to see if the fundamentals of general relativity hold fast under some pretty extreme conditions. If Einstein was alive, we're sure he'd be excitedly freaking out right now.

The bad news is, we still have a long wait in store before we know whether a worldwide telescope network was able to capture the image or not.

Astronomers around the world have now concluded five nights of black hole observations on two black holes, and need to get 1,024 hard drives worth of data from the Event Horizon Telescope's processing centres at MIT Haystack and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany so they can begin to study them.

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