Nature Hub

    Reporting by Roxanne Liu, Ella Cao and Ryan Woo;      Editing by Josie Kao, Grant McCool and William Mallard,     Blog Editor - Amal Udawatta The success could boost investor confidence in methane as a potential rocket fuel, which is deemed able to help slash costs and support reusable rockets in a cleaner and more efficient way. Several private Chinese rocket startups have lined up test or commercial launches, aiming to prepare their products for the increasing demand in China's expanding  commercial  space industry, amid growing competition to form a constellation of satellites as an alternative to Elon Musk's Starlink. Zhuque-2 Y-3 blasted off at 7:39 a.m. (1139 GMT on Friday) from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China's Inner Mongolia region, becoming the third LandSpace test rocket for Zhuque-2, and the first that succeeded in lifting satellites. A second attempt, without real satellites, in July made LandSpace the world's first company to launch methane-liq

  By Georgina Rannard BBC Climate and Science Reporter, Edited by - Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, ROYAL SOCIETY Image caption, Fossil hunters on the south coast of England sent pictures of their finds to scientists One of the first scientific findings signed by a woman is now online for the public to see for the first time. Martha Gerrish's descriptions of the stars in 1734 joins discoveries by Isaac Newton, Victorian fossil hunters and pioneer photographers. The documents have been digitised by the scientific institution the Royal Society in London. It hopes it will lead to more discoveries as researchers use the archive. Around 250,000 documents can now be viewed online, covering everything from climate observations, the history of colour, how to conduct electricity, and animals. You can access the online archive  here.  We have picked out some of the highlights: First letter signed by a woman In 1734 a woman living in New England called Martha Gerrish wrote to the Royal Society t

          From - Kanowble Magazine           By - Carolyn Wilke,          Edited by - Amal Udawatta,                     Researchers Sara Klaasen and Andreas Fichtner splice optical fibers in the back of a vehicle atop an                                        Icelandic glacier. It is tricky work for cold hands in a harsh environment.                            CREDIT: HILDUR JONSDOTTIR               Fichtner, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is one of a cadre of researchers using fiber optics to take the pulse of our planet. Much of this work is being done in remote places, from the tops of volcanoes to the bottoms of the seas, where traditional monitoring is too costly or difficult. There, in the last five years, fiber optics have started to shed light on seismic rumblings, ocean currents and even animal behaviors. Grímsvötn’s ice sheet, for example, sits on a lake of water thawed by the volcano’s heat. Data from the new cable reveal that the fl

 From - BBC News By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, Edited by Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES A Japanese researcher has told a major genetics conference that he has created eggs from the cells of male mice. The research, still in its early stages, involved turning male XY sex chromosomes into female XX ones. Prof Katsuhiko Hayashi from Osaka University is working on developing fertility treatments. The development, which he has submitted for publication in the scientific journal Nature, raises the prospect of male couples having their own children. Prof George Daley of Harvard Medical School, who is not involved in the research, said that there was still a long way to go before society was faced with such a decision. ''Hayashi's work is unpublished but fascinating. [Doing this on Humans] is harder than the mouse," he said. We still don't understand enough of the unique biology of human gametogenesis (the formation of reproductive cells) to reproduce H