Nell Greenfield Boyce

U.S.

Since private astronaut and wealthy entrepreneur Jared Isaacman became NASA's administrator a few months ago, he's been shaking up its Artemis moon program.

In a speech at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., he said work on the lunar space station, known as Gateway, would stop so that all efforts can go towards constructing a permanent moon base.

NASA is on the verge of launching four astronauts on a mission to circle the moon and return for the first time since the 1970s, with a launch opportunity coming in about a week.

Landing astronauts on the lunar surface is targeted for 2028.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

For decades, scientists have known about something called the booba-kiki effect.

If you show people two shapes, one spiky and one that's round and blobby, and ask them which shape matches the made-up word booba and which shape matches the fake word kiki...

Most people think that booba goes with the rounded shape and kiki goes with the spiky one.

Now, in the journal Science, researchers describe some clever experiments with newborn chickens, showing that these baby birds made the same links between these particular sounds and these shapes.

That means whatever the booba-kiki effect is all about, it's not unique to humans or spoken language.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

When NASA workers tried fueling up the 322-foot-tall rocket earlier this month, they had problems like a liquid hydrogen leak.

But swapping out some seals and other work seems to have done the trick.

Lori Glaze leads NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.

The astronaut crew is starting its two-week quarantine to limit their exposure to illnesses before their flight around the moon and back.

NASA managers will meet late next week to conduct an extensive flight readiness review to discuss all aspects of the mission to make sure that everything is really ready to go.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

What we found was that somewhere around 2015, 2016 or so, it actually brightened in infrared light for about a year before it essentially plummeted and disappeared.

Recently, some researchers were going through archival data from a NASA spacecraft to track any changes in the brightness of millions of stars over a 15-year period.