Planex News

Many companies like SpaceX have tried (but failed) to send rovers and robots to Mars, also known as the Red Planet. But now NASA is going to move forward with their new Mars rover. Just like Solar Orbiter, Perseverance promises to ‘touch the Red Planet’, with a whole heap of hi-tech technology on board. The mission takes the art of space travel further as the whole point of the mission is to see whether life existed on Mars, or even see if microbial life exists NOW. It does this by searching for habitable conditions or dips in ground level where water could have thrived millions of years ago. Perseverance introduces a fast moving, hi-tech drill that can bore into the ground. It sends a message to the ‘brain’, which sends ANOTHER message to the arm, which picks the sample up and stores it in a drawer which will later be examined back on a Earth. Bigger samples or samples that share too heave will be left behind a special rock which future humans will pick up on a future mission. There a...

Ancient civilisations around the globe have made many petroglyphs (huge drawing on the ground). But what do they all mean? Did aliens come down to ancient peoples and tell them to create them? As many mainstream archaeologists continue to say they just made them, no reason, Toby Parry-Russell investigates. Most petroglyphs and other huge drawings of its type are carved into usually the desert floor. The most-used technique is to carefully rub away the the darker sand to reveal the lighter sand underneath. When this is repeated in various shapes, it can form amazing patterns and picture most people will never be able to do even in their wildest dreams.  Most petroglyphs show images of the so-called ‘gods’. Usually as figures, the ‘gods’ look like humans except with strange features, like strange hair, small heads, strange scaly skin or something else. For example, among the Nasca lines of Peru - an array of strange petroglyphs, there stands two figures. The first one’s name translat...

Inexplicable noises, spectral sightings, glowing orbs - something very strange is going on at the British Museum. But what? That is exactly the question investigative reporters are asking themselves as piles and piles of ghostly sightings appear on their desks. But what is all the commotion? No-one really knows... When the heavy, bolted gates of the museum are shut, after the last members of  the public have left, the British Museum undergoes a swift change. This grand place is the most popular tourist attraction in the whole of Britain, and without a constant stream of people coming in, the huge, glass dome fades to a whisper. A thick silence fills the cavernous galleries and corridors that surround it. By night, most of the lights have been extinguished, as the security guards carry out most of their duties by torchlight. So, ghosts are free to roam about. To go around the entire museum, you have to open and close 3,000 doors. Some of them are really heavy and hard to open. But o...

Film-makers have created a lot of cool films over the years, some with cool graphic effects or creepy alien invasions. But how would they work if they WERE real life? Read this article to raise your brain levels up and outsmart your parents... The classic Star Wars character C3P0 is not much different to any other humanoid robot. Instead of bones, robots have lots of moveable segments attached to one another. Each segment is fitted together with special metal ‘joints’, which can spin, turn, twist and much more when you program them to do so. All these special parts make the robot really flexible. In the American film Back To The Future, a professor invents a time-travelling car powered by plutonium. Based on this, the british chemist and inventor Professor Flux, PhD invented a time-travel machine. Powered by Ghlucoshianian Acid, a substance only found on Saturn, this incredible invention had to have cleaning machines to concentrate the acid, because it would horrible mutate humans if i...

The ancient aztec city of Teotihuacan (say tee-otto-hoo-i-can) has puzzled more experts than the Great Pyramids Of Giza have! The pyramid complex  consists of quite a few building and temples. At the front of the city, The Temple Of The Sun sits proudly overlooking the rest. A few more pyramid-like buildings follow, all leading to what is now known as the Avenue Of The Dead. This is quite a few miles long, but all of the buildings are the same, except one. Temple of the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl is the third-largest pyramid in the whole site. Also on the avenue is the Great Pyramid Of  Cholua and The Pyramid Of The Moon. Interestingly, a lake of liquid Mercury was discovered in an excavated tunnel beneath the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. There has been various lakes of other metals in other areas of the Mayan empire, but never Mesoamerica. Even more interestingly, Mercury is a superconductor. Although it is extremely dangerous to human beings, scientists have performed expe...

Scients studying Saturn’s icy moon, Titan, have spotted traces of life millions of years ago. These would have lived under the huge sheets of ice over the sea. In fact, life could still exist on the cold moon, but it’s too far for our probes to go to. In fact, to do this, the probe would have to have a portable drill, scanners and sensors, some sort of a camera that could see through thick ice, and a function where the bot could swim. All of this would cost more than billions, and there would have to be millions of people working day and night. Quite frankly, no-one would be able to code such delicate modes in a matter of time. In the Pixar film WALL-E, everyone has evacuated because there is too much rubbish to clean up. The lonely robot WALL-E is left alone to put it into cubes and stack them in a pile. We would have to make a machine similar to WALL-E, but except with the ice. So how do we know what they look like? Scientists and film-makers have simulated lots over the years, but n...

To celebrate 75 years since World War Two ended, we’ve got a special article for you... this one! So don’t go just yet, this won’t be boring! World War 2 was a battle between two groups of countries – the “Allies” and the “Axis“. The major Allied Powers were Britain, France, Russia, China and the United States. The major Axis Powers were Germany, Italy and Japan. The terrible Adolf Hitler lead the Axis, but don’t think he was nice. Hitler and his army marched across the whole world, sparking many battles in different places. At one point in the war, the Nazis (Hitlers army) were said to had been building ‘Die Glocke’, or ‘The Bell’. Nazi documantary writers said that The Bell was some sort of ‘time-travel machine’, but nobody really knows the truth. Die Glocke, says authors, was inspired by alien technology. The were said to have come down to earth in the war, and told the chief scientist about their machines. Strangely, he disappeared at the end of WWII. Many believe he went through a...

Everyone nowadays says that the lost city of Atlantis is found, or something like that. But in truth, no. People have ‘seen’ the underwater city in lots of places; near Ireland, just off the coast of Gibraltar, but none of these are actually correct. If you ever talk to someone studying Atlantis, they will probably describe it as ‘having greek-style buildings and advanced technology’, but, in fact, they haven’t looked at the real facts.  When the Greek philosopher Plato wrote about what he described Atlantis as, he didn’t say all this jibber-jabber. He said that it was made out of three rings around a central island. This was 4 stadis (A greek measurement) squared, followed by a ring of water (1 stadis), then an embankment of 1 stadis, then another ring of water (2 stadis), and so on and so forth. The final embankment was 3 stadis, covered on the outer edge by lots of stadis of water that Plato didn’t describe exactly. So now you know the real, time to find out about the fake. Myth...

For an enviromental special, you probably wouldn’t think of having an article about space, because, after all, there is no land in space. But actually, this article is about what it’s like in the cosmos, including black holes. Firstly, I’ve got to tell you of a rare event that happens usually once a century in the cosmos: a hypernova. You might/might not have heard of a supernova, which is when a huge star collapses in on itself, creating a huge show of dancing lights, usually forming a black hole. Well, a hypernova is basically the same thing, but with two differences: the star is so big  you  probably wouldn’t know it exists, but also, there are no black hole formations. Another amazing thing is that it could happen in your lifetime. To be around one would mean you would be completely dead; wether you knew about it or not. Even though our technology is very advanced, we still haven’t explored every region of The Milky Way. There could be unknown textures on different worlds,...

It has came to most of our readers a surprise to read about the mythical phoenix appearing and breaking our universe into small bits, but no. It is true. To flip your opinions upside-down I’ve decided to zoom in closer on the subject... It was on the 1st of November last year that lots of our readers explained to Toby News that every Friday for 6 weeks they were seeing a strange blue bird-like alien circling their nearby forests. Well now, that strange extra-terrestrial life form has come back after 14 weeks of hiding, and most of you said it looks bigger and tougher now. Your theories were in fact right, making Toby News the first press to know about ‘The Great Quackening’ as some of you called it, which is happening now in the Amindoromeda Galaxy, 1,208,000 light-years away from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Scientists studying this Supergiant Galaxy have said “The phoenix must have been drawn to power - the icy supergiant galaxy, containing only abandoned meteorites must have sound...