Latest news with #ChunWang
ABC News
14-05-2025
- Science
- ABC News
Australian polar adventurer turned astronaut Eric Philips takes part in historic SpaceX mission
Sitting under the night sky at Eric Philips' home in Victoria's high country, it is hard not to feel close to the cosmos. "The stars are always alluring and the place of dreams, right?" he said. "If anywhere you can let your imagination run wild it's up there, but for me it's no longer imagination. "That's the bizarre thing, it's reality now." Mr Philips is no stranger to extreme environments. As one of the world's leading polar experts, he and friend John Muir were the first Australians to ski to both the North and South Poles. When 7.30 caught up with him he had just returned from his boldest adventure to date – private space travel. Mr Philips became the first Australian to fly into space under the Australian flag as part of a chartered SpaceX mission in early April. The mission was privately funded and commanded by former Chinese national Chun Wang, a crypto billionaire, now a citizen of Malta, who Mr Philips guided on a ski trip in the Arctic Circle in 2023. "It's the most phenomenal tip a client could give me." Mr Wang purchased the chartered spaceflight from Elon Musk's SpaceX for an undisclosed figure. Mr Philips has described Mr Wang as a "denizen of the universe". "He considers himself nomadic because he travels the world, visiting every country that he can and is a Bitcoin entrepreneur, that's how he made his money in order to pay for this mission," he said. The mission, titled 'Fram2' after an early Norwegian polar research ship saw the crew become the first humans to complete an orbit of the North and South Poles. Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen and German polar scientist Rabea Rogge were also on board the 'Dragon' capsule. "It is an autonomous craft. Everything is planned by SpaceX, by ground control, mission control. It's uploaded into the system of the Dragon capsule and it will do everything from launch through to splashdown," Mr Philips said. After a year of training the crew launched from the historic Cape Canaveral in Florida on April 1. Their launch took them beyond the Kármán line, the boundary line 100 kilometres above sea-level where the atmosphere ends and outer space begins. "It's the most immersive experience you could possibly imagine." During the three-and-a-half-day mission in microgravity the crew completed 55 orbits of Earth. "You see all of Earth, all of Earth below you … you can turn around in that dome and you are seeing the entire horizon," Mr Philips said. "That feeling, I knew that would be profound in some way but I didn't know that it would affect me so emotionally. "Looking at Earth from that perch and knowing that we have a pretty rough history of treating our planet the way we do, and with the current bickering and squabbling amongst our people down on Earth, that if everyone could have the opportunity to see this incredible planet from above, I think it would give people much more perspective over their lives and how we should treat our fellow citizens and the Earth itself." While hurtling around the planet the crew conducted 22 research projects designed to pave the way for human long-haul space flight, including the first X-ray in space and the first attempt at growing mushrooms. "There's a big push at the moment to get to Mars and perhaps to build a Mars colony and for humans to inhabit that, so these research projects all contribute to this next phase of human life," Mr Philips said. Despite being in a hostile environment, Mr Philips said at no point did he feel close to death, except for when their spaceship re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. "Then you feel gravity start to take over and you are plummeting down to Earth at more than 500kph in absolute freefall," he said. After a successful splashdown off the coast of California, the crew of Fram2 accomplished one final piece of history, becoming the first astronauts to complete an 'unassisted egress', an exit of the spacecraft without additional medical and operational assistance. Just days after Mr Philip's mission another group took to the sky with private space company Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. An all-female crew, which included his fiancee Lauren Sanchez and pop singer Katy Perry, spent 11 minutes above the Earth. Space travel is currently extremely expensive for both civil and private space agencies, but Mr Philips believes it will become more accessible. He said SpaceX is developing a craft that will take hundreds of people into space. "You can literally board that spaceship like you board an Airbus or a Boeing aircraft and fly internationally. That is in the not-too-distant future, and I can certainly see that happening," he said. "That will ultimately bring the cost down and make space travel available to a wide group of people." Now aged 62, Mr Philips said his celestial experience with SpaceX has ignited his passion for the universe. "There is no question that I look at the night sky now from a different perspective and an acute longing to be back up there, it was such an intoxicating experience," he said. "If I had the opportunity to go back tomorrow, I would take it." Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV Do you know more about this story? Get in touch with 7.30 here.
Digital Trends
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
SpaceX gives slow TV a cosmic twist
When life gets too hectic, some folks turn to slow TV for a spot of meditative distraction. It might be a view of the passing scenery in a 10-hour train journey, footage of fish swimming around in a large tank of water, or even a video of a cozy log fire. The genre has now been given a cosmic twist after SpaceX shared a four-hour video showing the view from its Crew Dragon capsule during the recent Fram2 mission. Watch the extended, ~4-hour cut with additional views from the Dragon spacecraft flying over Earth's polar regions during the Fram2 mission — SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 4, 2025 Fram2 involved the first human spaceflight over the Earth's poles, with four non-professional astronauts spending several days in orbit. The Crew Dragon traveled around Earth at an altitude ranging from about 126 miles (202 kilometers) at its lowest point to 257 miles (413 kilometers) at its highest. Recommended Videos The crew were able to enjoy amazing views of Earth, and thanks to SpaceX's new video, you can, too. This particular Crew Dragon had the docking adapter (used for docking with the International Space Station) replaced with a glass dome from which the crew could enjoy awesome views of Earth and beyond. Watch carefully and you'll see them peering out of it. SpaceX often shares clips from its missions — just yesterday it posted a much shorter version of the video that you see here — so this longer one is a real treat for fans of orbital views as well as of slow TV. Fram2 launched on April 1, with the all-civilian crew led by entrepreneur Chun Wang. Away from enjoying the stunning scenery, the crewmembers also conducted scientific research geared toward helping future long-duration space missions. They also studied Earth's polar regions and their general space environment. Slow TV is a genre of television that involves long broadcasts of ordinary events, presented with minimal editing, narration, or dramatic elements. It originated in Norway about 15 years ago and became popular due to its calming nature, offering viewers a contemplative, immersive experience. If you've never tried it, here's a great opportunity! Please enable Javascript to view this content
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Ancient DNA pulls back curtain on the Sahara Desert's greener past
Editor's note: A version of this story appeared in CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. Picture the Sahara, and an inhospitable landscape of endless sand dunes and barren rock comes to mind. That's largely the case today, but 7,000 years ago the vast desert was an altogether different place: a verdant world of trees and rivers and home to megafauna such as hippos and elephants. Over the past decades, scientists have gleaned details of the 'green Sahara.' Now, with the help of ancient DNA from mummified remains, geneticists are figuring out who once lived there. The Takarkori rock shelter — situated in southwestern Libya's Tadrart Acacus mountains — offers a remarkable glimpse into the Sahara's greener past. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of 15 women and children at the site two decades ago. Initial attempts to extract ancient DNA from the remains fell flat. Cool and constant conditions — the opposite of the extreme temperature swings of today's Sahara — yield the best preserved DNA. New techniques made it possible to sequence the genome — a complete set of genetic material — of two mummified women. The analysis revealed intriguing information about the ancestry of the Takarkori people and how they adopted a herding way of life. Dark energy is a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, and it's thought to represent about 70% of the energy in the cosmos. New clues from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, known as DESI, suggest dark energy may be behaving in unexpected ways and may even be weakening over time. The collaboration, now in its fourth year of surveying the sky, has released its latest batch of data. While it's not the final word, the information has space scientists excited. 'We're in the business of letting the universe tell us how it works, and maybe the universe is telling us it's more complicated than we thought it was,' said Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which manages DESI. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent four tourists in a Crew Dragon capsule on a polar orbit never attempted before. Spearheading the Fram2 mission was Malta resident Chun Wang, who made his fortune running Bitcoin mining operations. He paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum for this trip. Watch a video of the spacecraft's splashdown off California's coast on Friday after Wang and his crewmates — film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and adventurer Eric Philips — spent 3.5 days in low-Earth orbit. It was the first journey to space for each of the four crew members, who all have ties to polar land exploration. Meanwhile, NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke out this week for the first time following a protracted nine-month mission to space. Here's what they had to say. To the untrained eye, stone tools may look like ordinary rocks, but to specialists they have fascinating stories to tell. Researchers have found stone artifacts crafted in a style closely associated with Neanderthals in East Asia for the first time at a site in southwestern China's Yunnan province. The discovery, dating back 60,000 to 50,000 years, has puzzled archaeologists, who have come up with competing hypotheses to explain the stone tools. Perhaps Neanderthals could have migrated east and reached what's now China, or a different species of ancient human possibly made tools uncannily similar to those unearthed in Europe. Either way, the answer could shake up what's known about human origins during the Stone Age. Ancestors of T. rex and their plant-eating prey would have congregated to drink water from a lagoon on what's now Scotland's Isle of Skye, according to an analysis of newly identified dinosaur footprints. Lead study author Tone Blakesley said he was among a small group that recognized an initial three footprints at the remote site on the isle's Trotternish Peninsula in 2019 when he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. 'It was very exciting,' Blakesley said. Documenting a total of 131 footprints, he used a drone to take thousands of overlapping images of the site before producing digital 3D models of the tracks. They are preserved in 'exquisite detail,' he added. Dive into these remarkable stories. — The discovery of a mystery king's tomb in Abydos, Egypt, is revealing fresh clues about a long-lost dynasty notoriously missing from records of pharaohs who once ruled the region. — Scientists sent a container of cooked soybean paste to the International Space Station, where it was left to ferment before returning to Earth as miso. Here's how it tasted. — An eerie spiral recently lit up European skies, and it's becoming a more common sight. — Archaeologists excavating a massive tomb in Pompeii unearthed extremely rare, nearly life-size marble statues that shed new light on the power held by priestesses in the ancient city. Like what you've read? Oh, but there's more. Sign up here to receive in your inbox the next edition of Wonder Theory, brought to you by CNN Space and Science writers Ashley Strickland, Katie Hunt and Jackie Wattles. They find wonder in planets beyond our solar system and discoveries from the ancient world.
CNN
05-04-2025
- Science
- CNN
Ancient DNA pulls back curtain on the Sahara Desert's greener past
Picture the Sahara, and an inhospitable landscape of endless sand dunes and barren rock comes to mind. That's largely the case today, but 7,000 years ago the vast desert was an altogether different place: a verdant world of trees and rivers and home to megafauna such as hippos and elephants. Over the past decades, scientists have gleaned details of the 'green Sahara.' Now, with the help of ancient DNA from mummified remains, geneticists are figuring out who once lived there. The Takarkori rock shelter — situated in southwestern Libya's Tadrart Acacus mountains — offers a remarkable glimpse into the Sahara's greener past. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of 15 women and children at the site two decades ago. Initial attempts to extract ancient DNA from the remains fell flat. Cool and constant conditions — the opposite of the extreme temperature swings of today's Sahara — yield the best preserved DNA. New techniques made it possible to sequence the genome — a complete set of genetic material — of two mummified women. The analysis revealed intriguing information about the ancestry of the Takarkori people and how they adopted a herding way of life. Dark energy is a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, and it's thought to represent about 70% of the energy in the cosmos. New clues from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, known as DESI, suggest dark energy may be behaving in unexpected ways and may even be weakening over time. The collaboration, now in its fourth year of surveying the sky, has released its latest batch of data. While it's not the final word, the information has space scientists excited. 'We're in the business of letting the universe tell us how it works, and maybe the universe is telling us it's more complicated than we thought it was,' said Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which manages DESI. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent four tourists in a Crew Dragon capsule on a polar orbit never attempted before. Spearheading the Fram2 mission was Malta resident Chun Wang, who made his fortune running Bitcoin mining operations. He paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum for this trip. Watch a video of the spacecraft's splashdown off California's coast on Friday after Wang and his crewmates — film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and adventurer Eric Philips — spent 3.5 days in low-Earth orbit. It was the first journey to space for each of the four crew members, who all have ties to polar land exploration. Meanwhile, NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke out this week for the first time following a protracted nine-month mission to space. Here's what they had to say. To the untrained eye, stone tools may look like ordinary rocks, but to specialists they have fascinating stories to tell. Researchers have found stone artifacts crafted in a style closely associated with Neanderthals in East Asia for the first time at a site in southwestern China's Yunnan province. The discovery, dating back 60,000 to 50,000 years, has puzzled archaeologists, who have come up with competing hypotheses to explain the stone tools. Perhaps Neanderthals could have migrated east and reached what's now China, or a different species of ancient human possibly made tools uncannily similar to those unearthed in Europe. Either way, the answer could shake up what's known about human origins during the Stone Age. Ancestors of T. rex and their plant-eating prey would have congregated to drink water from a lagoon on what's now Scotland's Isle of Skye, according to an analysis of newly identified dinosaur footprints. Lead study author Tone Blakesley said he was among a small group that recognized an initial three footprints at the remote site on the isle's Trotternish Peninsula in 2019 when he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. 'It was very exciting,' Blakesley said. Documenting a total of 131 footprints, he used a drone to take thousands of overlapping images of the site before producing digital 3D models of the tracks. They are preserved in 'exquisite detail,' he added. Dive into these remarkable stories. — The discovery of a mystery king's tomb in Abydos, Egypt, is revealing fresh clues about a long-lost dynasty notoriously missing from records of pharaohs who once ruled the region. — Scientists sent a container of cooked soybean paste to the International Space Station, where it was left to ferment before returning to Earth as miso. Here's how it tasted. — An eerie spiral recently lit up European skies, and it's becoming a more common sight. — Archaeologists excavating a massive tomb in Pompeii unearthed extremely rare, nearly life-size marble statues that shed new light on the power held by priestesses in the ancient city.
CNN
05-04-2025
- Science
- CNN
Ancient DNA pulls back curtain on the Sahara Desert's greener past
Picture the Sahara, and an inhospitable landscape of endless sand dunes and barren rock comes to mind. That's largely the case today, but 7,000 years ago the vast desert was an altogether different place: a verdant world of trees and rivers and home to megafauna such as hippos and elephants. Over the past decades, scientists have gleaned details of the 'green Sahara.' Now, with the help of ancient DNA from mummified remains, geneticists are figuring out who once lived there. The Takarkori rock shelter — situated in southwestern Libya's Tadrart Acacus mountains — offers a remarkable glimpse into the Sahara's greener past. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of 15 women and children at the site two decades ago. Initial attempts to extract ancient DNA from the remains fell flat. Cool and constant conditions — the opposite of the extreme temperature swings of today's Sahara — yield the best preserved DNA. New techniques made it possible to sequence the genome — a complete set of genetic material — of two mummified women. The analysis revealed intriguing information about the ancestry of the Takarkori people and how they adopted a herding way of life. Dark energy is a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, and it's thought to represent about 70% of the energy in the cosmos. New clues from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, known as DESI, suggest dark energy may be behaving in unexpected ways and may even be weakening over time. The collaboration, now in its fourth year of surveying the sky, has released its latest batch of data. While it's not the final word, the information has space scientists excited. 'We're in the business of letting the universe tell us how it works, and maybe the universe is telling us it's more complicated than we thought it was,' said Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which manages DESI. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent four tourists in a Crew Dragon capsule on a polar orbit never attempted before. Spearheading the Fram2 mission was Malta resident Chun Wang, who made his fortune running Bitcoin mining operations. He paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum for this trip. Watch a video of the spacecraft's splashdown off California's coast on Friday after Wang and his crewmates — film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and adventurer Eric Philips — spent 3.5 days in low-Earth orbit. It was the first journey to space for each of the four crew members, who all have ties to polar land exploration. Meanwhile, NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke out this week for the first time following a protracted nine-month mission to space. Here's what they had to say. To the untrained eye, stone tools may look like ordinary rocks, but to specialists they have fascinating stories to tell. Researchers have found stone artifacts crafted in a style closely associated with Neanderthals in East Asia for the first time at a site in southwestern China's Yunnan province. The discovery, dating back 60,000 to 50,000 years, has puzzled archaeologists, who have come up with competing hypotheses to explain the stone tools. Perhaps Neanderthals could have migrated east and reached what's now China, or a different species of ancient human possibly made tools uncannily similar to those unearthed in Europe. Either way, the answer could shake up what's known about human origins during the Stone Age. Ancestors of T. rex and their plant-eating prey would have congregated to drink water from a lagoon on what's now Scotland's Isle of Skye, according to an analysis of newly identified dinosaur footprints. Lead study author Tone Blakesley said he was among a small group that recognized an initial three footprints at the remote site on the isle's Trotternish Peninsula in 2019 when he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. 'It was very exciting,' Blakesley said. Documenting a total of 131 footprints, he used a drone to take thousands of overlapping images of the site before producing digital 3D models of the tracks. They are preserved in 'exquisite detail,' he added. Dive into these remarkable stories. — The discovery of a mystery king's tomb in Abydos, Egypt, is revealing fresh clues about a long-lost dynasty notoriously missing from records of pharaohs who once ruled the region. — Scientists sent a container of cooked soybean paste to the International Space Station, where it was left to ferment before returning to Earth as miso. Here's how it tasted. — An eerie spiral recently lit up European skies, and it's becoming a more common sight. — Archaeologists excavating a massive tomb in Pompeii unearthed extremely rare, nearly life-size marble statues that shed new light on the power held by priestesses in the ancient city.
