In The News:
I Just Learned What 'Milky Way' Stands For, And It Has Nothing To Do With SpaceWe've written before at HuffPost UK about why Hobnobs , Twix , and Snickers are called what they are.
But given how many chocolate bars' brands are space-themed ― Mars, Galaxy, and Milky Way, for instance ― it feels odd to think we haven't addressed any seemingly astronomic names yet.
Milky Way bars in the US are similar to the UK's Mars bars, boasting a creamy nougat base and a caramel topping.
The UK Milky Way bar, however, has a fluffy, vanilla-flavoured nougat filling ― but while the US version came first, the inspiration behind the name holds true for both.
NASA discovers potentially habitable exoplanet 40 light years from Earth
NASA announced the discovery of a planet 40 light years from Earth that orbits every 12.8 days and is possibly even habitable.
Gliese 12 b is a ⁘super Earth exoplanet⁘ that is nearly the same size as Earth or slightly smaller, according to a NASA news release . Exoplanets are planets outside of our solar system, NASA's website says.
"We've found the nearest, transiting, temperate, Earth-size world located to date," Masayuki Kuzuhara, a project assistant professor at the Astrobiology Center in Tokyo, said in a statement. "Although we don't yet know whether it possesses an atmosphere, we've been thinking of it as an exo-Venus, with similar size and energy received from its star as our planetary neighbor in the solar system."
Fact Check: This Is Supposedly an Accurate Rendering of a 1 Cubic Millimeter Sample of a Human...
With whispy blue, green, and orange-hued strands jetting atop a black background, an image shared to Reddit on May 12, 2024, claimed to show "1 cubic millimeter of brain." At the time of this writing, the post had received more than 26,000 upvotes.
A Google keyword search returned dozens of relevant results, including a Smithsonian Magazine article published in May 2024 that described researchers who created a "digital map showing a tiny chunk of a human brain in unprecedented detail."
This image is authentic and genuinely shows a 3D map of neurons found in the brain. We've rated this claim as "True," but let's first describe exactly what that research means – and what is featured in the rendering.
Earlier this month, NASA announced it was funding a revolutionary high-thrust rocket — called a Pulsed Plasma Rocket — that could make crewed missions to Mars in just two months.
That's seven months faster than it'd take with current technology, and it would drastically reduce the risk and cost of a crewed Mars mission, according to Howe Industries, which is developing the concept. It "holds the potential to revolutionize space exploration," NASA said in a statement.
The PPR is just one of the latest developments in the US's decadeslong discussion to send humans to Mars . In the early '60s, for example, nuclear-bomb-powered spaceships were proposed for the trip.
"That's kind of like a joke within the space community or the Mars community," Matthew Shindell, a curator with the National Air and Space Museum, told Business Insider. "Putting humans on Mars is always 20 years away."
To fully understand why the US hasn't sent humans to Mars despite sending more robots there than any other country, it just takes a trip down memory lane. Here's a history of the US's most promising crewed Martian missions that never were.
In the '40s and '50s, no one really knew what they might find on Mars, but they knew getting there would be tricky. One of the first to seriously tackle the problem was Wernher von Braun.
He envisioned a 260-day mission that would launch in 1985 with 10 spaceships and 70 crew members. "He sat down and did the math and created a whole story around it," Shindell said.
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