World’s Largest Airplane’s First-Ever Flight

Weighing 500,000 pounds and boasting two fuselages and a wingspan of 385 feet, Stratolaunch‘s behemoth of a plane—which will launch rockets into Earth’s orbit—took flight for the first time ever this past weekend. Taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port, the Stratolaunch ascended to 15,000 feet, reaching speeds up to 175 MPH, before landing successfully two hours later. “It was an emotional moment …

Link About It: This Week’s Picks

The first-ever photo of a black hole, artwork-adorned Japanese currency, inspiration from Milan Design week and more

First-Ever Photo of a Supermassive Black Hole Truly a quantum leap, astronomers have “seen the unseeable” and captured an image of a supermassive black hole—a “smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity,” Dennis Overbye writes for the New York Times. A planet-sized network of eight radio telescopes—called the Event Horizon Telescope—peered through interstellar dust and gas to reveal the black hole, located in a …

Newly Discovered Species of Ancient Human

Recently discovered in a cave in the Philippines, a previously unknown species of ancient human contradicts popular evolution theory. It seems that homo sapiens weren’t the only surviving species of humans a few thousand years ago—these tinier, tree-climbing species (aka homo luzonensis) dates back 50-67,000 years ago. A lot is still a mystery about these people though: how did they end up on Luzon, an …