NASA has launched the world's lightest satellite into space, designed by an 18-year-old Indian student. The instrument, which weighs just 64 grams, is also the first satellite to be 3D printed.

The 'KalamSat' satellite, named after India's former President APJ Abdul Kalam, also a nuclear scientist, was launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Thursday.

"Today we made history," the satellite's designer, 18-year-old Rifath Shaarook, told ANI news agency.

An unknown, unseen "planetary mass object" may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets to be published in the Astronomical Journal. This object would be different from—and much closer than—the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence yet awaits confirmation.

In the paper, Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, or LPL, present compelling evidence of a yet-to-be- discovered planetary body with a mass somewhere between that of Mars and Earth. The mysterious mass, the authors show, has given away its presence—for now—only by controlling the orbital planes of a population of space rocks known as Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs, in the icy outskirts of the solar system.

While most KBOs—debris left over from the formation of the solar system—orbit the sun with orbital tilts (inclinations) that average out to what planetary scientists call the invariable plane of the solar system, the most distant of the Kuiper Belt's objects do not. Their average plane, Volk and Malhotra discovered, is tilted away from the invariable plane by about eight degrees. In other words, something unknown is warping the average orbital plane of the outer solar system.

"The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass," says Volk, a postdoctoral fellow at LPL and the lead author of the study. "According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured."

The Kuiper Belt lies beyond the orbit of Neptune and extends to a few hundred Astronomical Units, or AU, with one AU representing the distance between Earth and the sun. Like its inner solar system cousin, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Kuiper Belt hosts a vast number of minor planets, mostly small icy bodies (the precursors of comets), and a few dwarf planets.

Researchers have uncovered the fossils of one of the largest dinosaurs to ever walk on the Earth - remains which they believe could belong to a previously undiscovered species.

Paleontologists digging near the city of Morella in eastern Spain discovered the remains of a gigantic dinosaur which would have measured a staggering 20-meters (65 ft) from head to tail.

The team unearthed over 80 bones belonging to the same dinosaur, Spanish newspaper El Pais reports. Included in this haul were two femurs, a humerus, other parts of limbs and vertebrae from the tail of a sauropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous period.

Experts with Queen's University Belfast (QUB) in Northern Ireland have warned that it's only a matter of time before a large asteroid strikes Earth, causing a natural catastrophe unparalleled in the ruin that it would bring.

Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons, an expert with QUB's Astrophysics Research Center, compared the inevitable destruction to the Tunguska event of 1908, when a meteoroid exploded in orbit above a Siberian forest, raining impactors down on the woods below. The impact, estimated to have been the equivalent of 3 to 5 megatons of TNT (333 to 500 times as much power as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima), flattened 770 square miles of forest. No human casualties were reported, but had the event happened in a densely populated area, the casualties would have likely been in the millions.

Since then, Earth has had its fair share of near misses. In January, an asteroid as big as or larger than the Tunguska impactor came within 110,000 miles of Earth - less than half the distance between the Earth and the moon, a stone's throw by astronomical standards. In August 2027, an asteroid half a mile long is expected to buzz the Earth, and has a tiny chance of striking the planet.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the launch of a deep-space observatory to hunt down habitable planets in other star systems and any alien life forms that may reside there.

An ESA committee approved the PLATO Mission on Tuesday during a meeting in Madrid, according to Warwick University, whose scientists will be taking part in the project.

"This means it can move from a blueprint into construction," a university statement reads.

The launch, due to take place in 2026, will see PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) and its 26 onboard telescopes launched into the 'L2' virtual point in space, located 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) beyond Earth.

Once it has reached its destination in space, PLATO will "monitor thousands of bright stars over a large area of the sky, looking for regular dips in brightness as planets pass by them."

It will also investigate seismic activity in some of the host stars, determining their masses, sizes, and ages "with unprecedented accuracy."

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has warned yet again that humans should leave Earth and explore other planets to avoid doomsday. Speaking at the Starmus Science Festival in Trondheim, Norway, Stephen Hawking stressed the necessity of one day leaving the planet due to climate change and dwindling resources.

"I am convinced that humans need to leave earth. The Earth is becoming too small for us, our physical resources are being drained at an alarming rate," Hawking said, as cited by British media, adding that there is no more space on Earth to overcome a new crisis.

"When we have reached similar crisis in our history there has usually been somewhere else to colonize. Columbus did it in 1492 when he discovered the new world. But now there is no new world. No Eutopia around the corner. We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds," he stated.

"If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before," the 74-year-old said, noting that humanity is about to enter a new era, in which "colonization of other planets is no longer science fiction, it can be science fact." Hawking added that there is no other option.

The founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Jack Ma, is warning artificial intelligence will replace human workers, but it will never replace human wisdom.

"Artificial intelligence may take a lot of jobs away. If we don't move fast enough. If we're not innovative enough. If we don't give simple and easy technology products for small businesses, most of them can't survive in 10 years. If small businesses can't survive, we can't survive," said Ma, speaking in Detroit at the Gateway 17 conference for entrepreneurs.

Like great white sharks and grizzly bears, mountain lions are one of the most fearsome wild animals for many Americans.

But new research shows that the lions may be more afraid of us than we are of them.

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz placed audio and video equipment in the Santa Cruz Mountains near areas where lions had killed deer and other animals. When a lion came to feed, a motion-activated device broadcast the sounds of people talking and Pacific tree frogs croaking, in addition to turning on a tiny hidden video camera.

In 29 experiments with 17 lions from December 2015 to June 2016, the lions ran away in 83 percent of cases as soon as they heard human voices — and only once when they heard the frog sounds.

Russia's nuclear fuel company has launched production of fuel assemblies for a nuclear reactor in the US. The first test batch of fuel assemblies is scheduled to be delivered to the US in 2019, a senior company official has said.

TVEL, the fuel supply wing of the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, Rosatom, has begun production of TVS-KVADRAT (FA-SQUARE), the new fuel type designed for PWR (pressurized water reactor) plants of Western design.

"A contract on test-industrial operations with one of the US [nuclear power plants] operators is already signed, and we'll deliver test batch of TVS-KVADRAT fuel assemblies in 2019," TVEL's Senior VP for Commerce and International Business, Oleg Grigoriev, told reporters at a news conference during the Atomexpo-2017 forum on Tuesday.

Your brain's reward pathways become active during art-making activities like doodling, according to a new study from Drexel University.

Girija Kaimal, EdD, assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, led a team that used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) technology to measure blood flow in the areas of the brain related to rewards while study participants completed a variety of art-making projects.

"This shows that there might be inherent pleasure in doing art activities independent of the end results. Sometimes, we tend to be very critical of what we do because we have internalized, societal judgements of what is good or bad art and, therefore, who is skilled and who is not," said Kaimal. "We might be reducing or neglecting a simple potential source of rewards perceived by the brain. And this biologocial proof could potentially challenge some of our assumptions about ourselves."

For the study, co-authored by Drexel faculty including Jennifer Nasser, PhD, and Hasan Ayaz, PhD, 26 participants wore fNIRS headbands while they completed three different art activities (each with rest periods between). For three minutes each, the participants colored in a mandala, doodled within or around a circle marked on a paper, and had a free-drawing session.