Space debris tracker LeoLabs raises $65 million as satellites launch to orbit at unprecedented rate

LeoLabs, a private venture that tracks objects and debris in low Earth orbit through a network of radars around the world, raised $65 million in capital in a new fundraising round, the company announced on Tuesday. “It’s a great endorsement of our success to date and where we’re headed,” LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told CNBC. “We’re the largest data provider for [low Earth orbit] in the world now … we’ve stepped beyond anybody in the public or private [sectors].”

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Why are we so uncharitable to those doing good deeds?

From veganism to fundraising, psychologists have found acts of altruism often attract mistrust and even anger

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A Browsable Petascale Reconstruction of the Human Cortex

Posted by Tim Blakely, Software Engineer and Michał Januszewski, Research Scientist, Connectomics at Google

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Fifteen Years of Radar Reveal Venus’s Most Basic Facts

Planetary scientists agree that a Venusian day is a little longer than 243 Earth days, but for decades their measurements have disagreed about the additional number of minutes and seconds. What’s more, those measurements haven’t been precise enough to infer other fundamental properties of Venus, like how the length of a day changes, the tilt of the planet’s spin relative to its orbital plane, and the precession of that tilt. Without these precise values, a craft attempting to land on Venus might miss its target zone by as much as 30 kilometers.

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Scientists discover how stem cells trigger muscle regeneration

Researchers at the Salk Institute have uncovered a mechanism by which stem cells can help regenerate muscles. The discovery could provide a new drug target for repairing muscles after injury or rebuilding muscle mass lost during the normal aging process.

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Elephant Trunks: Is There Anything They Can’t Do?

A new study highlights the impressive biomechanics and suction power of an elephant’s most defining appendage.

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Space junk damages International Space Station's robotic arm

A piece of space junk smashed into the International Space Station and damaged the orbiting lab's robotic arm, according to NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.

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