According to NASA's article on the test, this is a big step toward sending a manned mission to Mars:

NASA successfully tested the first deep space RS-25 rocket engine for 500 seconds March 10, clearing a major milestone toward the next great era of space exploration. The next time rocket engine No. 2059 fires for that length of time, it will be carrying humans on their first deep-space mission in more than 45 years.

This is all part of a plan to send humans to Mars by 2030, which NASA has laid out in this beautifully illustrated image:

NASA released images of the recent solar eclipse. When seen from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) it's just the shadow of the moon traveling across Earth. 

This is a first, according to Adam Szabo, NASA’s project scientist for DSCOVR: 

What is unique for us is that being near the Sun-Earth line, we follow the complete passage of the lunar shadow from one edge of the Earth to the other. A geosynchronous satellite would have to be lucky to have the middle of an eclipse at noon local time for it. I am not aware of anybody ever capturing the full eclipse in one set of images or video.

via earthobservatory

The newly discovered spider called the dolomedes briangreenei hails from, you guessed it, Australia.  One of it's species, whose name is Brian, was presented at the World Science Festival in Brisbane. 

He was named after Professor Brian Greene, cofounder of the World Science Festival and a string theorist. 



Brian (the spider, not the string theorist) uses vibrations in the water to fish. Robert Raven, Principal Scientist of Arachnology at the Queensland Museum told Mashable:

These spiders sit there on the water and then all of a sudden an insect will hit the water and the spider races out to get it, grabs it, dives under the water and then swims back to the shore and starts eating it. 

It eats insects, fish and toads up to three times it's own size. Apparently its bites aren't that dangerous but the fact remains; now even the water is not safe from spiders. 

NASA engineer and physicist Harold White is working on using the theory of relativity to travel at warp speed. The ship will be called IXS Enterprise, while he's still working on the math to prove it can be done, the concept art has already been completed by designer Mark Rademaker. In an interview with The Washington Post Rademaker explained the purpose behind the designs:

"We wanted to have a decent image of a theory conforming Warp ship to motivate young people to pursue a STEM career," Rademaker said in an e-mail interview. "It does have some Sci-Fi features that might never transfer to a possible final design, unless we really want to."

In preparation for a final episode, the Mythbusters team reunited to say goodbye and relive some of the amazing and explosive moments on the show:

Scientists used a method usually reserved for finding serial criminals and identify the source of infections diseased to pinpoint the location of the elusive artist, Banksy.  

Using the statistical models below they used the geographical locations of Banksy's projects and ended up finding a strong correlation with one person in particular. 



According to the BBC, publicly available information such as addresses or places he went to led scientists to Robin Gunningham, a man suspected of being Banksy since 2008.  A co-author of the study, biologist Steve Le Comber, told the BBC, "What I thought I would do is pull out the 10 most likely suspects, evaluate all of them and not name any… But it rapidly became apparent that there is only one serious suspect, and everyone knows who it is."

The galaxy in question looks a little fuzzy, but that's probably because it's so far away. A lot of the things we see from space are actually past versions of themselves because the light from the object took several years to get here. According to the video description, the light from this galaxy, blurry as it may be, took a very, very long time to get to the Hubble space telescope:

This animation shows the location of galaxy GN-z11, which is the farthest galaxy ever seen. The video begins by locating the Big Dipper, then showing the constellation Ursa Major. It then zooms into the GOODS North field of galaxies, and ends with a Hubble image of the young galaxy. GN-z11 is shown as it existed 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only three percent of its present age.

This new development is record breaking and astronomers don't expect to beat it anytime soon until the launch of a new, larger observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope.


via NASA