Reuters Science News Summary

Following is a summary of current science news briefs. Weather postpones SpaceX's first astronaut launch from Florida

Stormy weather thwarted a landmark moment for private rocket company SpaceX and NASA on Wednesday, forcing launch directors in Florida to postpone what would have been the first flight of U.S. astronauts into orbit from American soil in nine years. The countdown, made especially suspenseful by shifting weather conditions, was halted just 16 minutes and 54 seconds before the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket had been due to launch astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a 19-hour ride to the International Space Station. Elon Musk's SpaceX raises $346 million ahead of debut astronaut mission

Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Tuesday that it raised $346.2 million in a new round of funding, a day before it launches two American astronauts to the International Space Station. The private rocket company's launch of its first crewed mission on Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida will put an end to the U.S. space agency's nine-year hiatus in human spaceflight. Collision of galaxies may have spurred our solar system's formation

A violent event on a colossal scale - the crash of two galaxies - may have paved the way for our solar system's birth. A star-formation binge in the Milky Way spanning the time when the solar system was born more than 4.5 billion years ago was apparently precipitated by the collision between our galaxy and a smaller one called Sagittarius, scientists said on Tuesday. In lean times, fierce dinosaur Allosaurus resorted to cannibalism

The dreaded dinosaur Allosaurus was the scourge of the Jurassic Period landscape some 150 million years ago, an apex predator just as Tyrannosaurus rex was 80 million years later during the Cretaceous Period. And, like T. rex, Allosaurus may have engaged in cannibalism to keep its tummy filled during lean times, based on a western Colorado trove of fossils described by scientists on Wednesday.