'I didn't expect them to be there,' says University of Alberta scientist

Scientists from the University of Alberta have accidentally discovered the first two subglacial lakes found in the Canadian Arctic - and their unique conditions could help scientists in their search for life beyond Earth.

The two lakes were found underneath the ice cap, below between 550 and 750 metres of ice.

The discovery was made by Anja Rutishauser, a PhD student in radio glaciology, who was studying the bedrock conditions underneath the Devon Ice Cap, one of the largest ice caps in the Canadian Arctic.

The revival of space launches from a sea platform serves as a pilot project for Russia's space agency's ability to benefit from private capital. Neglecting the commercial aspects of spaceflight is no longer an option.

Russian space agency Roscosmos has long ignored the arrival of private firms in the space industry, and the result has been the loss of international customers and sluggish development in new technology. But now Roscosmos is apparently willing to cooperate with for-profit organizations. As the world celebrates International Space Day on Thursday, RT looks at how the revival of the Sea Launch project attempts to become a proof-of-concept for a shift in how the Russian space industry works.

In late December 2017, a rocket was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and delivered a telecommunications satellite into orbit. The Russia-made spacecraft was supposed to reach geosynchronous orbit and become the first operated by the African nation of Angola. Instead, it experienced communication glitches and was finally ordered by mission control to go into hibernation. AngoSat 1 may yet to be revived later this month, but there is not much hope for it.

Yet one party involved in the launch considered it a big success. The carrier rocket that delivered AngoSat 1 to its orbital grave was a Russian-Ukrainian Zenit-3F, a version of a rocket family developed by the Soviet Union and remarkable for its other version - the Zenit-3SL. The letters stand for 'Sea Launch' - an ambitious collaboration for launching commercial payloads from a sea platform floating near the equator. The December 2017 launch was the first for Sea Launch's new private owner, the S7 Space.

A trio of satellites studying our planet's magnetic field have shown details of the steady swell of a magnetic field produced by the ocean's tides.

Four years of data collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm mission have contributed to the mapping of this 'other' magnetic field, one that could help us build better models around global warming.

Physicist Nils Olsen from the Technical University of Denmark presented the surprising results at this year's European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, explaining how his team of researchers managed to detail such a faint signature.

"It's a really tiny magnetic field," Olsen told BBC correspondent Jonathan Amos.

The world's first 3D-printed house has been unveiled in the French city of Nantes. The first tenants of the groundbreaking public housing property are scheduled to move in by June.

Researchers at the University of Nantes are responsible for the project, which was built using a robot 3D printer, known as 'BatiPrint3D,' in just 18 days before its hollow walls were filled with cement.

The robot uses a special polymer material that should insulate the 95-square-meter (1000-square-foot), five-room house for a century.

"Is this the future? It's a solution and a constructive principle that is interesting because we create the house directly on site and in addition thanks to the robot, we are able to create walls with complex shapes," Benoit Furet, a professor who worked on the project, told Reuters.

Located in one of the closest star systems to our own at just 4.2 lightyears away, the exoplanet Proxima b seemed like a great candidate for a space colony once we're capable of that sort of thing. Not so much anymore.

Because even though Proxima b is in that solar system's habitable zone (often called its "goldilocks zone"), its star Proxima Centauri seems to be more volatile than our sun. Proxima Centuari has been detected unleashing a giant solar flare of approximately 316,227,766,000 petajoules (316,227 petawatts). It was powerful enough that the normally dim red dwarf star could be seen from Earth.

It was also powerful enough that it may have fried any life living on the surface of Proxima b, and this may be common enough that future settlements there wouldn't last very long.

Now, it's unlikely that any life was sitting on the surface while this event occurred. One reason is that the chances of life forming so close are slim, and we have no evidence of any life there beyond that the planet is usually the right temperature for liquid water to form.

Most people know that the X chromosome is one of the two sex chromosomes; inherit an X from each of your parents and you will likely be deemed "biologically female." Get an X from your mother and a Y from your father and you will likely be deemed "biologically male." Unlike the other twenty-two pairs of chromosomes, the sex chromosomes are not identical in structure.

As historian Stephen G. Brush writes, the term "X chromosome" was coined by C.E. McClung, for "accessory chromosome." McClung noticed that in some organisms only one sex had the "X." Sex determination by chromosome, though, was discovered in 1905 by Nettie Stevens and Edmund Wilson, working independently. The nature of the XY relationship was determined first by Dr. Stevens.

Examining mealworms, she noticed that the chromosomes were different in males and females. Females contained twenty large chromosomes, while males contained nineteen large chromosomes and one small chromosome. Stevens deduced that biological sex was determined by this last pair of chromosomes, and that the female-determining feature was larger.

The ancient remains of a gigantic marine reptile have been found in southwestern England. Known as an ichthyosaur, the animal lived about 205 million years ago and was up to 85 feet long-almost as big as a blue whale, say the authors of a study describing the fossil published today in PLOS ONE.

Biology textbook have long touted the modern blue whale as the largest animal that ever lived, but this and other fascinating fossil finds hint that there may once have been even bigger creatures swimming Earth's seas.

What is this animal?

Ichthyosaurs were ocean-going contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with body shapes superficially similar to dolphins. They reached their greatest diversity about 210 million years ago in the late Triassic, but some persisted into the late Cretaceous. They vanished from the fossil record about 25 million years before the mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.

For one brave man, eating one of the hottest peppers in the world came with an unexpected side effect: Days of splitting headaches that prompted a trip to the emergency room.

The unusual case, detailed in The BMJ on Monday, began immediately after the 34-year-old man took part in a chili pepper eating contest. He ate a Carolina Reaper, the pepper christened as the world's hottest by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2013 (though there have been several unofficial challengers to the title since).

Immediately after eating the pepper, he started dry heaving. Then he felt excruciating neck pain that soon radiated throughout his entire head. For the next several days, he would experience short but incredibly painful bursts of head pain known as thunderclap headaches. The episodes got so bad that he eventually visited the ER.

Gone in a (cosmological) flash: a team of astronomers found 72 very bright, but quick events in a recent survey and are still struggling to explain their origin.

Miika Pursiainen, PhD researcher from the University of Southampton, presented the new results at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool.

Pursiainen and his collaborators found the transients in data from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Programme (DES-SN). This is part of a global effort to understand dark energy, a component driving an acceleration in the expansion of the Universe. DES-SN uses a large camera on a 4-metre telescope in the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean Andes. The survey looks for supernovae, the explosion of massive stars at the end of their lives. A supernova explosion can briefly be as bright as a whole galaxy, made up of hundreds of billions of stars.

The researchers found the largest number of these quick events to date. Even for transient phenomena, they are very peculiar: while they have a similar maximum brightness to different types of supernovae they are visible for less time, from a week to a month. In contrast supernovae last for several months or more.

Welcome to a new and occasional blog about the transient universe. We're calling it "Big Scope Breakout." Every Wednesday, I post the "Explore the Night" blog here at Sky & Telescope, where we explore brighter comets, exploding stars, and fascinating deep sky objects. But a lot of unanticipated sky events can happen in a week - supernovae, Earth-approaching asteroids, and comet discoveries, to name just a few.

To better serve observers with larger instruments in a timely manner, we're going to get that news to you ASAP, so you can spot these transient events before the clouds close in, the Moon returns, or the target fades from view. Some of the most exciting sights can be rather dim, so expect to see more reports of fainter objects than brighter. Of course, that won't always be true. It all depends on what the cosmos has on the menu.

This week we're bananas with supernovae and novae, plus there's a new storm on Saturn.