Apparently, just as easily as on Earth. You just use a lens to focus sunlight to melt the lunar dust, turn it into tiles, and put them together. The only thing you need to take is the lens. And some people or robots to do the actual construction work...
(Science fiction writers writing about lunar colonies take note. This technique could be used for more than just roads!)
...and so are pretty pictures. Like this image of the stellar nursery NGC 364.
Lots of dust. And now we can get a good count of the stars and protostars. We'll learn about star formation.
But I sort of want to hang that on my wall.
One of the things birders like is when a poor bird gets lost. It was trying to fly to Newfoundland and winds up in Scotland.
(In the U.K. "twitcher" was a derogatory term for people who chased those birds and trampled all over people's property on the way).
We now know why migratory birds (and sometimes local birds) get lost: Space weather. Solar flares can interfere with their ability to navigate using the magnetic field and cause them to wander way, way off course.
There have been instances of these lost birds getting help from the handy humans to get back on track...by hitching rides on ships going the right direction. Apparently cruise ships going across the North Sea routinely have passengers too, but those birds are just being lazy and smart ;).
In 2029, a NASA mission will reach the asteroid Psyche. Psyche is metal. Very metal. The estimate is about 60 percent. We don't know how it got so metal.
Metal asteroids like this could contain valuable resources for building in space, where you don't need to pull them out of a gravity well.
Or, perhaps, it's aliens.
Nah.
Definitely not.
...not if you're a bee.
Bee sex is determined by the Csd gene, which has more than 100 variations. Except...that it's still the same. Two different alleles, girl. Two of the same, boy.
But you don't want to be a sexually produced boy bee. Drones are produced via asexual reproduction and reproduce only outside the hive.
So, what happens to male workers?
Infanticide. The eggs are "not raised." Which is probably a euphemism, nothing's wasted in a hive.
No, we don't currently know how the workers can tell. Scent is the lead theory.
Why do we care? It could be useful for breeding better bees.
...including a 1.2 mile tall dust devil. 200 feet diameter. Moving at about 12 mph. They couldn't see the top of it, but they were guessing the height. Perserverence snapped it.
Dust devils on Mars get huge because of the lower atmospheric pressure. And dust storms can encompass the entire planet.
If writing stuff on Mars...here's some bad weather for you to use.
Oh, and they can come with lightning too!
NASA has a problem. You know that asteroid sample.
They got more than they bargained for. Specifically the dark fine-grained material on the inside of the lid and base was unexpected. And could give us SCIENCE sooner than we thought. What an excellent problem to have!
One of the things the JWST discovered was a swarm of mysterious early galaxies that were just...too...bright. They didn't have time to form enough stars.
Now we've worked it out. They aren't massive, but it turns out that in the early universe, stars may have formed more explosively, in rapid, bright bursts. As galaxies got bigger, the process (gas ejection from supernovas) became impossible.
It's kind of like a forest. Large numbers of saplings grow in a young forest but are crowded out in a mature one, resulting in steadier replacement.
NASA found enough funding to continue to monitor the New Horizons spacecraft until the end of the decade.
The mission will now be to explore another Kuiper Belt Object, but they are yet to announce which one. In 2028 or 2029 the craft will leave the Kuiper Belt.
There's a significant source of carbon dioxide on Europa. And it seems to be leaking from the subsurface oceans.
Could this mean there is life? It seems pretty likely. Complex life? Unlikely...
