Scientists Find “the Holy Grail Of Astronomy” After Uncovering A Galaxy That Is Made Up Of Mostly

“Space Train” Concept Could Get Humans to Mars in Two Days, If Only It Would Work

Watch The Martian (2015) Full Movie

Watch The Martian (2015) Full Movie

Turning sunlight into clean fuel is now cheap and simple

Questioning the reliability of research

This year, one of the top five most talked-about research studies was on the reliability of research findings.

The Reproducibility Project is a vast, multi-institution effort aimed to measure how often researchers could replicate psychology experiments and yield the same result. For the project, 270 academics, including researchers at UC Riverside, UC San Francisco and UC Davis, attempted to replicate the findings from 100 recently published psychology experiments.

They failed twice as often as they succeeded; in fact, only 36 percent of the replicated studies yielded results consistent with earlier findings.

That doesn’t necessarily indicate the original research wasn’t accurate or reliable, researchers say. Many factors, including a lack of detail into methodology, can influence replicability. But the report — published in August in the journal Science  — does highlight the challenge of producing reliable findings and suggests that more could be done to enable replicatable results.

Read the other research stories that got the world buzzing in 2015 →

This is the spaceship that could bring humans to Mars

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Rosette Nebula

Stardust

China and the US create a ‘space hotline’ to avoid conflicts

NASA is keeping 4 people in a tiny cabin for a month, because science

The path to space is pretty cramped.

The US space agency has just announced that it’ll be sticking four volunteers inside a tiny house for 30 days, as part of an experiment to test how isolation and “close quarters” affect people’s behaviour. Once inside, the volunteers can’t leave the cabin, and will only be able to regularly communicate with each other and NASA mission control (that means no Internet).

It sounds pretty uncomfortable, but if we want to make it further into space - all the way to Mars, for example - people are going to have to live in cramped spaces for months at a time with very little contact with the outside world, and scientists need to be able to predict the effects - including every little thing that could go wrong.

The compact, three-storey house that the volunteers will be living in is called the Human Research Exploration Analog (HERA), and it’s what NASA is calling a “science-making house”. That means there are lots of little experiments on board to keep the team occupied, like plants to grow and tiny shrimp to take care of.

Flowers could be blooming on the International Space Station after the New Year

Having already grown lettuce (images above) on the International Space Station, astronauts are now attempting to grow the first flowering plants. On 16th November, NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren activated the plant growth system named Veggie and its rooting “pillows” containing Zinnia seeds.

“Growing a flowering crop is more challenging than growing a vegetative crop such as lettuce,” said Gioia Massa, NASA Kennedy Space Center payload scientist for Veggie. “Lighting and other environmental parameters are more critical.”

Lindgren will turn on the red, blue and green LED lights, activate the water and nutrient system to Veggie, and monitor the plant growth. The experimental flowers are expected to bloom early 2016, after 60 days of growth.

“Growing the Zinnia plants will help advance our knowledge of how plants flower in the Veggie growth system, and will enable fruiting plants like tomatoes to be grown and eaten in space using Veggie as the in-orbit garden,” said Trent Smith, Veggie program manager at Kennedy. Growing tomato plants on the space station is planned for 2017.

Image credit: NASA/Gioia Massa