While mission scientists were at it, they also produced a spectacular flyover of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon
New Horizons flyover of Pluto. (Source: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Paul Schenk and John Blackwell, Lunar and Planetary Institute)
The still images of Pluto sent home to Earth by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July of 2015 were remarkable enough.
The incredible distance to Pluto — 4.67 billion miles! — meant that until then, the dwarf planet was long shro ...read more
The GOES-16 weather satellite acquired the imagery used in this animation showing Hurricane Fernanda swirling in the eastern Pacific Ocean for 24 hours, starting on Saturday, July 15. (Note: The animation repeats several times.) As of Saturday, Fernanda was a powerful Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds close to 130 miles per hour. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA SLIDER. Please note that The GOES-16 data are preliminary and non-operational.)
As of Monday afternoon, winds of about 125 miles ...read more
Last month, a neuroscience paper appeared that triggered a maelstrom of media hype:
The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions
The human brain sees the world as an 11-dimensional multiverse
Scientists find mysterious shapes and structures in the brain with up to ELEVEN dimensions
The paper, published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, comes from the lab of Henry Markram, one of the world’s most powerful neuroscientists. As well as being head of the Blue Brain ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
The first exoplanet was spotted in 1988. Since then more than 3,000 planets have been found outside our solar system, and it’s thought that around 20 percent of Sun-like stars have an Earth-like planet in their habitable zones. We don’t yet know if any of these host life – and we don’t know how life begins. But even if life does begin, would it survive?
Earth has undergone at least five mass extinctions in its history. It’s long been thought ...read more
A common triplefin, one of the fish species that may dominate temperate habitats in the near, acidic future. Photo c/o Wikimedia
Scientists predict that in the next twenty years, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will rise from the roughly 404 ppm it is now to over 450 ppm—and as a result, ecosystems worldwide will change. Many impacts will be particularly felt in our planet’s oceans. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, more of the gas dissolves in ...read more
It’s a good thing field sobriety tests don’t exist for bugs, because the jumping spider Myrmarachne formicaria would fail for doing what keeps it alive: walking in a wobbly line. The spider fools predators by imitating an ant. The act is so thorough that it includes how the spider looks, stands and even moves.
Many, many types of jumping spiders have evolved to look like ants. Imitating another animal with better defenses is a tried-and-true strategy for avoiding predators ...read more
It appears that memes and science don’t mix well. A pair of researchers have published an apology in a peer-reviewed journal – for using the word “derpy” in an earlier paper.
In April 2016, Archives of Sexual Behavior published a piece called Fighting the Derpy Science of Sexuality by Banu Subramaniam and Angela Willey.
In this paper, Subramaniam and Willey criticized studies of biological differences between human groups:
The various sciences of‘& ...read more
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Apollo 8’s launch, also known as SA-503. NASA.
If you look up a list of all Apollo missions NASA flew in the 1960s and 70s, you’d see Apollo 1, then Apollo 4 through 17. So what exactly happened to the missing Apollos 2 and 3?
When NASA started testing Apollo and Saturn hardware in the early 1960s — the hardware that would eventually fly to the Moon — it established a pretty standard nomenclature. Every rocket was given a letter designation for the rocket and paylo ...read more
