Jun 27th, 2025 - – More than 200 people across a half-dozen southern U.S. states have now reported witnessing a Most sightings of the streak of light and fireball came from Georgia and South Carolina around 12:30 p.m., according to a report from the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City, Georgia. Here's what to know about the object: Pieces of meteor believed to be on ground in Georgia NASA determined that it was about the size of a shopping cart as it streaked through the sky. Scientists were able to track the meteor's path after analyzing eyewitness accounts, images from cameras and data ... [Read More]

Jun 27th, 2025 - By There's a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it's both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as sprawling clouds of gas and dust. But even so, there is a lot of elbow room: the nearest star to the sun is more than four light-years distant, separated from us by tens of trillions of kilometers. That's an immense distance and difficult to even analogize. Saying our fastest space probes would take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star is still such a ponderous concept that it's ... [Read More]

Jun 27th, 2025 - A fatal fungus once thought to be a curse could potentially help fight disease. Scientists discovered molecules in a fungus linked to Tutankhamun's tomb that stop the proliferation of cancer cells and are as effective as currently used treatments. Fungi may hold a treasure trove of medical breakthroughs just waiting to be unearthed. The "pharaoh's curse" fungus , Aspergillus flavus, can be used to fight leukemia, according to a study published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology . The fungus is called "pharaoh's curse" because it is "linked to the deaths of several archeologists who ... [Read More]

Jun 27th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, June 27 The Moon passes 3° north of Mercury at 2 A.M. EDT. By evening the two are visible in the western sky, roughly 8° high an hour after sunset. The crescent Moon lies 9.5° east (to the upper left) of magnitude 0.2 Mercury, which is closer to the horizon. Between them is the gorgeous Beehive open cluster (M44), whose scattered stars shine collectively at 4th magnitude. Covering nearly 100' on the sky, this cluster is best taken in visually or at low magnification, such as with binoculars or your telescope's finder ... [Read More]

Jun 27th, 2025 - Viking® ( www.viking.com ) has taken delivery of the company's newest ocean ship, the Viking Vesta ®. The delivery ceremony took place this morning when the ship was presented at Fincantieri's shipyard in Ancona, Italy. Classified as a small ship, as are all Viking ocean ships, the Viking Vesta has 499 staterooms that can host 998 guests. The Viking Vesta joins the company's growing fleet of award-winning ocean ships and will spend her inaugural season sailing itineraries in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. "We are proud to welcome the Viking Vesta to our fleet of elegant, ... [Read More]

Jun 26th, 2025 - A rarely seen daytime fireball that may have been dropped by a meteor was spotted across the Southeast on Thursday — creating a sonic boom that blared through the region. The American Meteor Society received numerous reports of a fireball over the region on Thursday afternoon, its website shows. The reports came during the Bootids meteor shower, a lower-level meteor shower that is ongoing this week, according to an American Meteor Society list. "It looks to be a 'daytime fireball' that caused a sonic boom. This is usually indicative of a (meteor) dropping a fireball, but not always," ... [Read More]

Jun 26th, 2025 - Daniel Kleppner, a highly honored physicist who developed technologies that helped pave the way for the Global Positioning System and whose foundational atomic discoveries helped open up the field of quantum computing, died June 16 at a hospital in Palo Alto. He was 92. His wife, Beatrice, confirmed the death but did not provide the cause. Dr. Kleppner spent nearly four decades as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his contributions in atomic physics as a doctoral student at Harvard University in the late 1950s under physicist and future Nobel laureate Norman ... [Read More]

Jun 26th, 2025 - A U.S. House subcommittee issued a stark warning to the nation's financial sector this week: The quantum computing age is coming, and with it, the inevitable collapse of current data encryption. In a Tuesday hearing titled "Preparing for the Quantum Age: When Cryptography Breaks," experts testified that the time to prepare is now, as foreign adversaries are already stealing encrypted American data with the intent to decrypt it once quantum computers are powerful enough to do so. The hearing, held by the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, delved ... [Read More]