The ELaNa IV launch, containing 11 Cubesat missions, on November 19 , 2013. (Credit: NASA) In the vastness of space, unfathomable size is generally the norm. But when Jordi Puig-Suari, an aerospace engineering professor, began looking at the stars, he started thinking small. Together with Bob Twiggs, a professor at Stanford University, they developed the CubeSat, a tissue box-sized satellite that has intensified interest in space and revolutionized satellite communication. When Puig-Suari work ...read more

Astronomers watched a dying star, dubbed HuBi 1, get a brief second lease on life. (Credit: Nature Astronomy (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0551-8) Often when stars die, they go out with a bang in the form of a supernova, leaving a small, dim stellar corpse in the center of a gaseous nebula. But sometimes, these leftover stars can get a new spark of life. Astronomers used a telescope in the Canary Islands to watch a dying star, dubbed HuBi 1, get a brief second wind. And as they observed, the ...read more

(Credit: Alexander Raths/Shutterstock) Male doctors, you’re doing great, but you may want to take some notes from your female colleagues. That’s because more and more studies are coming to the same conclusion: Female doctors produce better outcomes than men. Back in 2016, Harvard researchers showed that elderly patients treated by female doctors were less likely to die or return to the hospital than if they were treated by a man. They extrapolated their findings a bit, and conclude ...read more

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In a slightly depressing new paper, two researchers describe how they tried to get access to the data behind 111 of the most cited psychology and psychiatry papers published in the past decade. The researchers, Tom E. Hardwicke and John P. A. Ioannidis of Stanford, wanted to place the data into a ‘Data Ark‘ to ensure its continued preservation for science. Unfortunately, in most cases, the data was not made available. The paper is called Populating the Data Ark and it’s out no ...read more

Scientists have discovered smaller dogs aim higher, most likely to appear larger. Photo Credit: Mike Finkelstein You know how people say you should aim high? Well, small male dogs have taken that advice to heart. A new study has found that they lift their legs higher when urinating than larger dogs, apparently attempting to appear bigger than they are.  Dog walkers know that walking a male dog is an exercise in patience, as they want to pause to sniff, lift, and dribble a little urine ...read more

Cruise ship employees, part of a “polar bear guard” unit, shot this bear after it got close to them. Experts say such encounters are happening more often. (Credit: Gustav Busch Arntsen/Governor of Svalbard) Workers were still fast asleep in their orange tents at Greenland’s Summit Station when the polar bear neared camp. An early riser spotted the bear and shouted to alert campers, sending people to the safety of a hard-sided building nearby. As the bear scoured the research ...read more

Voyager (left) launched in 1977; New Horizons (right) launched in 2006. The two missions have a curiously interconnected past.(Credit: NASA/JPL; NASA) While many people know about the Voyager missions launched in the 1970s and the New Horizons probe that visited Pluto in 2015, few are aware that the relationship between these two missions dates back to the 1960s. Had scientific goals been different at the time, Voyager might have taken the place of New Horizons, decades before the latter was e ...read more

SIMP J01365663+0933473, shown here in this artist’s concept, is a massive, nearby exoplanet with a powerful, aurora-generating magnetic field.(Credit: Caltech/Chuck Carter; NRAO/AUI/NSF) A bizarre rogue planet without a star is roaming the Milky Way just 20 light-years from the Sun. And according to a recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, this strange, nomadic world has an incredibly powerful magnetic field that is some 4 million times stronger than Earth’s. Furthe ...read more