Estee Lauder Pays NASA $128,000 for Photo Shoot on the ISS

PetaPixel reports: The cosmetics giant Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128,000 for a product photography shoot onboard the International Space Station. Bloomberg reports that the company will be paying the space agency to fly 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair skin serum to the orbiting space station on a cargo run that will launch from Virginia on Tuesday and dock…

NASA Launches New $23 Million Toilet to International Space Station

First, PetaPixel reminds us that Estee Lauder’s products will be launching into space this week:
The cosmetics giant Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128,000 for a product photography shoot onboard the International Space Station. Bloomberg reports that the company will be paying the space agency to fly 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair skin serum to the orbiting space station on…

Nearby red dwarf star not so quiet and life-friendly after all

Astronomers say the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 887 appears to have more dangerous flare activity than first believed. This could make life tough – but maybe not impossible – on its family of super-Earth planets. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/red-dwarf-gliese-887-flares-in-ultraviolet-light…

Planetary defenders validate asteroid deflection code

Planetary defense researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) continue to validate their ability to accurately simulate how they might deflect an Earth-bound asteroid in a study that will be published in the April issue of the American Geophysical Union journal Earth and Space Science. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-03-planetary-defenders-validate-asteroid-deflection.html…

The Human Brain Evolved When Carbon Dioxide Was Lower

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: Kris Karnauskas, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Colorado, has started walking around campus with a pocket-size carbon-dioxide detector. He’s not doing it to measure the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. He’s interested in the amount of CO2 in each room. The indoor concentration of carbon dioxide…

IAU approves 2nd round of names for Pluto features

New Horizons provided what will be the only close-up images of Pluto many of us will see in our lifetimes. The new feature names from the International Astronomical Union recognize the mission’s forerunners in Earth and space mythology and history. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/iau-approves-new-pluto-feature-names-2019…