- Rescue teams have managed to free a man trapped 1,000m underground in Germany’s deepest cave. Johann Westhauser, who’s 52, was injured during a weekend holiday trip with two other cave explorers. The Riesending cave is so deep it took one of the man’s companions 12 hours to return to the surface to raise the alarm. Dozens of rescuers have since spent days carefully carrying the injured man down extremely narrow passageways. He has now been taken to hospital to be treated for his injuries.
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- The first set of high-resolution results from ESA’s three-satellite Swarm constellation reveals changes in the magnetic field that protects our planet. Launched in November 2013, Swarm is providing unprecedented insights into the complex workings of Earth’s magnetic field, which safeguards us from the bombarding cosmic radiation and charged particles. Measurements made over the past six months confirm the general trend of the field’s weakening, with the most dramatic declines over the Western Hemisphere. But in other areas, such as the southern Indian Ocean, the magnetic field has strengthened since January.
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- Elon Musk, SpaceX founder, has revealed that it is certainly possible to shuttle off humans to Mars in 10 to 12 years. The inventor said that the thing which matters in the long run is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary but he is hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years. A private company founded by Musk in 2002, SpaceX designs, builds and launches spacecrafts and rockets into low-Earth orbit. The company’s goal is to one-day send humans into space so that they can live on other planets.
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- Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have claimed that dwarf galaxies are responsible for forming a large proportion of the universe’s stars. The result supports a decade-long investigation into whether there is a link between a galaxy’s mass and its star-forming activity, and helps paint a consistent picture of events in the early universe. Lead author Lead author Hakim Atek of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said they already suspected these kinds of galaxies would contribute to the early wave of star formation, but this is the first time we’ve been able to measure the effect they actually had. The infrared capabilities of WFC3 have allowed astronomers to finally calculate how much these low-mass dwarf galaxies contributed to the star population in our universe.
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- Based on fossils collected from Montana in the United States and Alberta, Canada, scientists have named a new species of horned dinosaur (ceratopsian). Mercuriceratops (mer-cure-E-sare-ah-tops) gemini was approximately 6 meters (20 feet) long and weighed more than 2 tons, and lived about 77 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period. Mercuriceratops (Mercuri plus ceratops) means ” Mercury horned-face,” referring to the wing-like ornamentation on its head that resembles the wings on the helmet of the Roman god, Mercury.