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H ouse Republicans impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday. It was only the second time the House chose to impeach a cabinet member in US history. The first time happened almost 150 years ago with William Belknap, President Ulysses Grant's Secretary of War, who found himself caught up in a brazen kickback scheme at a time of unparalleled economic expansion, few regulations and too many temptations. Belknap was a Civil War hero who had fought in the battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg and was promoted to Brigadier General in 1864. Grant, who admired Belknap and had befriended the Princeton-educated lawyer and former Iowa legislator, appointed him to be his Secretary of War in 1869. After serving seven years in President Grant’s cabinet, Belknap was charged with "criminally disregarding his duty" and "basely prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain." Belknap’s downfall was his decision to abuse his authority to appoint “sut...

A mysterious widespread cellphone outage has coincided with the eruption of two powerful "X-class" solar flares from a "dangerous" sunspot. Yet scientists warn that the two events are probably unconnected. The two intense flares burst from the sunspot AR3590 Wednesday (Feb. 21) at 6:07 p.m. ET (23:07 GMT) and Thursday (Feb. 22) at 1:32 a.m. ET (06:32 GMT), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). After Travel ing to Earth at the speed of light, the flares caused successive shortwave radio frequency blackouts that lasted one or two hours. The first was over the western U.S. and Pacific Ocean, and the second was over the Indian Ocean. Related: Watch the 1st X-class solar flare of 2024 erupt from the sun in explosive fashion Hours later at 11a.m. ET (16:00 GMT) , multiple cellular providers — including AT&T , Verizon and T-Mobile — reported disruption to their service across the U.S. for over 70,000 users, according to the d...

A Viking Age marketplace may be buried on a Norwegian island, new research suggests. Archaeologists surveying part of the historic island of Klosterøy, in southwest Norway about 190 miles (300 kilometers) west of Oslo, used ground-penetrating radar to detect signals from what appear to be the buried remains of several pit houses and piers. The archaeological remains suggest the site could have been a market during the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066), and other finds hint that the place was important to local people long before that, according to Kristoffer Hillesland , a researcher at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology who took part in the research. "It was likely that this was a power center during the Iron Age," or from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 800 in this region, Hillesland told Live Science, noting that several large burial mounds from this period are visible nearby. The marketplace would have been established later, he said, possibly when the i...

A gigantic plume of plasma recently exploded from the sun's south pole, where solar erupt ions almost never occur. The explosion, which a photographer captured in stunning detail, is another telltale sign that the sun is about to enter its most active phase — the solar maximum .  The rare phenomenon occurred on Feb. 17, when a solar flare exploded from a sunspot near the sun's south pole, releasing a gigantic column of ionized gas, or plasma, that towered around 124,300 miles (200,000 kilometers) above the solar surface — around 15 times taller than Earth, Spaceweather.com reported . The plasma eventually snapped away from the sun and hurtled into space as a gigantic cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).   Astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau captured a highly detailed composite image of the plume before it broke away from the solar surface. "The plasma column was so large, I had to rotate the camera to fit it into the frame," Poupeau t...

Telescopes are great for exploring space, but there's no way should you be pointing one of them at the sun unless you have a solar filter — and as luck would have it, Unistellar is offering a solar filter worth a whopping $249 for free if you buy one of the company's smart telescopes.  This is a great time to get your hands on a solar filter as we get closer to the 8 April total solar eclipse , which will briefly plunge parts of the United States into darkness. This deal ends on March 3, so you have a bit of time to think about it — and telescopes are a big purchase — but with the eclipse fast approaching, it may be worth getting your hands on the kit sooner rather than later. That way, there's time to learn how to use the telescope properly before the big day.   Buy a Unistellar tellescope and you'll get a free Smart Solar Filter, worth up to $249 . View Deal Unistellar has an excellent lineup of telescopes — we previously called the Unistellar ...

A defunct, 5,050-pound (2,290 kilograms) satellite has tumbled uncontrollably back to Earth after spending three decades in space.  After slowly falling to Earth for more than 12 years, the European Space Agency's (ESA) ERS-2 satellite reentered Earth's atmosphere at 12:17 p.m. ET (5:17 p.m. GMT) on Wednesday, Feb. 21, burning up over a remote patch of the North Pacific Ocean roughly halfway between Alaska and Hawaii, according to ESA. No damage to property has been reported, and it is unclear if any debris survived the fiery plunge through the atmosphere. The dead satellite — which studied Earth's climate from its launch in 1995 until it was retired in 2011 — is one of hundreds of pieces of space debris that will fall back to Earth this year. Most pieces of space debris that reenter Earth's atmosphere are smaller than 3.2 feet (1 meter) across, according to ESA; however, even large objects like ERS-2 pose virtually no risk to people or property on the ground. ...

Water molecules have been detected on the surface of an asteroid for the first time, revealing new clues about the distribution of water in our solar system. Scientists studied four silicate-rich asteroids using data gathered by the now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope-outfitted plane operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Center. Observations by SOFIA's Faint Object InfraRed Camera (FORCAST) instrument showed that two of the asteroids — named Iris and Massalia — exhibit a specific wavelength of light that indicated the presence of water molecules at their surface, a new study reports. "Asteroids are leftovers from the planetary formation process, so their compositions vary depending on where they formed in the solar nebula," study lead author Anicia Arredondo, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. "Of particular interest is the distribution of water on asteroids, because ...