TV News LIES

As soon as the end of February, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will launch a new telescope into orbit around the Earth called SPHEREx. Its goal is to examine nothing less than the essential ingredients of life in our galaxy and the origin of the universe itself.

SPHEREx will join the ranks of other space telescopes, filling in a crucial gap by detecting infrared light with wavelengths too long to see with the naked eye. It's an important addition because no single instrument can fully perceive the universe and its contents.

The new telescope's infrared detectors have to be kept super cold, so the instrument is housed inside three concentric cones atop a set of mirrors that protect it from the sun's energy and the spacecraft's own heat. The whole thing looks like a giant funnel.

"It weighs a little less than a grand piano and uses about 270, 300 watts of power — less than a refrigerator," said Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx's deputy project manager, at a press conference in late January.

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A Louisiana aquarium has a new star — and a mystery — on its hands after a baby shark was born in a habitat without any males.

The Shreveport Aquarium announced last week that Yoko the swell shark — named for "Onyoko," the Chumash word for shark — hatched on Jan. 3, about eight months after her egg was first discovered in a tank with only female inhabitants.

Not only that, it said, but its team "determined that the two female sharks present in the tank had not been in contact with a male in over 3 years."

"This situation is incredible and shows the resilience of this species," Greg Barrick, the aquarium's curator of live exhibits, said in the release. "It really proves that life ... uh ... finds a way."

Is it a miracle, a medical mystery or more? Scientists have two main theories.

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Fast radio bursts, strong pulses of energy detected in radio-wave frequencies, may be a common phenomenon in the cosmos, but their enigmatic origins are something astronomers are only beginning to understand.

Take, for instance, one such fast radio burst astronomers recently tracked to the distant outskirts of a long-dead galaxy.

Based on what scientists thought they knew about fast radio bursts, referred to in astronomy as FRBs, this type of galaxy should not contain the kind of star long thought to produce such bursts. The surprising source of the repeating burst has baffled astronomers, who haven't considered that regions in which no stars are forming could produce such a

For scientists, our earliest ancestor wasn’t Adam or Eve but Luca. Luca didn’t look anything like us – it was a single-celled bacterium-like organism. A recent study by a team of scientists based in the UK has delivered rather shocking news about this illustrious forebear. Despite having lived almost as far back as seems possible, Luca was surprisingly similar to modern bacteria – and what’s more, it apparently lived in a thriving community of other organisms that have left no trace on Earth today.

Luca – short for the last universal common ancestor, the progenitor of all known life on Earth – seems to have been born 4.2bn years ago. Back then our planet was no Eden but something of a hell on Earth: a seething mass of volcanoes pummelled by giant meteorites, and having recovered from a cosmic collision that blasted the world apart and created the moon from some of the fragments. There is good reason why the geological aeon before 4bn years ago is called the Hadean, after the Greek god of the underworld Hades.