Pioneer 10 flies past Jupiter as the first mission to the giant planet.(Credit: NASA on the Commons (Flickr))
Before Voyager 1 and 2 explored the outer solar system, Pioneer 10 and 11 paved the way. Launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, these spacecraft were the first to transit the asteroid belt and the first to make close observations of Jupiter (both Pioneer 10 and 11) and Saturn (Pioneer 11). Like their successors, the Voyagers and New Horizons, both Pioneers are past the orbit of Pluto ...read more
Using remote camera traps, photographer Heath Holden captured rare images like this one of wild Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) in their natural habitat. The animals’ bright red ears and eerie, raucous scuffles earned the scrappy marsupials their haunting common name. (Credit: Heath Holden)
On a misty summer morning in 2015, Manuel Ruiz ditched his pickup truck along a dusty two-track road in northwest Tasmania and trod into a grove of eucalyptus. He was searching for a devil. &l ...read more
This artist’s concept depicts a supermassive black hole surrounded by a dense disk of gas and dust in the center of a galaxy. (Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Just last year, three American physicists shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their role in the historic detection of gravitational waves. The signals came from cosmic ripples in space-time created by some of the most violent events in the universe: colliding black holes.
Scientists have now detected six gravitational-wave signals &mdas ...read more
(Credit: Kaushik Panchal/Unsplash)
For a cloud to appear, it takes more than water vapor. Water won’t condense into droplets, or nucleate, without a surface to do so on, and this often takes the form of particles floating around the atmosphere so tiny as to be invisible. Called aerosols, these particles play an important role in everything from the pace of climate change to the water cycle because they influence how clouds form and grow.
Natural aerosols come from any number of ...read more
(Credit: Radu Bercan/shutterstock)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian novel, Player Piano, things get a little awkward after industrialist Dr. Paul Proteus, escorted in a black government limo, passes a crew of “Reeks and Wrecks,” or displaced laborers who could no longer compete economically with the machines that filled factories like Proteus’ Illium Works.
In the street, some 40 construction workers are hunched over shovels and pitchforks, all watching a single man fill a ...read more
The smokey conditions are so bad that one Canadian newspaper has labeled it a “smoke-pocalypse”
A thick, widespread smokey blanket was seen over northwestern North America by the Suomi-NPP spacecraft on Aug. 15, 2018. (Source: NASA Worldview)
I was going to take a break from covering the wildfires blazing across large swaths of western North America — until I checked on remote sensing data this morning and saw the satellite imagery above and lower down in t ...read more
The beetle Cretoparacucujus cycadophilus, trapped in amber along with grains of pollen for 99 million years, likely used highly specialized mandibles for pollination. (Credit Chenyang Cai)
A new species of beetle, preserved in a piece of amber along with several grains of pollen, is the earliest direct evidence of an insect pollinating an ancient plant group nearly 100 million years ago. It’s also just supercool to look at.
To understand why this new beetle with the gigantic nam ...read more
Photo: flickr/wackyvorion
[Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science papers. Enjoy! ...read more
