Jupiter’s signature stripes are streams of gas that flow in alternating directions. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill)
What would Jupiter be without its stripes? The Great Red Spot might be Jupiter’s most famous feature, but the giant planet would be unrecognizable without the multicolored bands streaking across its face.
The colors are there thanks to the chemistry of Jupiter’s atmosphere, but the striped pattern itself comes from long-lived winds called zona ...read more
(Credit: Yuricazac/Shutterstock)
Sleep deprivation strikes us all at some point in our lives, from stressed-out students struggling through finals week to parents of a newborn barely catching a wink. They’re all running on empty. And if you happen to interact with one of these poor souls, you’ll likely notice they may seem a bit distant. If so, you may feel a little bummed yourself once you part ways. You’re not imagining things, at least according to new research i ...read more
(Credit: Ondrej Prosicky/shutterstock)
Native Americans may have kept a breeding colony of scarlet macaws in the American Southwest starting more than 1,000 years ago, a new study finds. The birds were raised for their colorful plumage hundreds of miles from their native jungles.
With their brilliant red, yellow and blue plumes, scarlet macaws are likely the best-known parrots of the New World. These birds normally range from South America to eastern coastal Mexico and Guatemala.
Yet, over the ...read more
NASA astronaut Harrison Schmidt shaves during the Apollo 17 mission. (Credit: NASA)
On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space when he piloted the Mercury capsule Freedom 7. His sub-orbital journey lasted 15 minutes. Like most children who grew up in the early era of space flight, I remember this moment well.
The flight was extra special for me because my dad, Arthur L. Levine, worked for NASA. As a human resources administrator, he recruited John Glenn, who in 1962 became ...read more
Scientists find that parasites dramatically alter how much methane a sheep emits.
It’s estimated that 40% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and a substantial portion of that is directly ’emitted’ by livestock. And just last year, climate scientists reported that we’ve actually been underestimating the extent to which the combined belches and flatulence of farmed animals contributes to climate change by 11%. Unsurprisingly, there& ...read more
Photo: Flickr/Steven Guzzardi
[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. En ...read more
NASA’s Terra satellite spied this heart-shaped hole in the cloud deck over the Pacific on August 7, 2018. (Source: NASA Worldview)
I’m always on the look out for interesting images of Earth shot from space so that I can share them here at ImaGeo. And when I saw the one above, I just couldn’t resist it.
Source: NASA Worldview
Often, the cloud deck extends along the coast of California and down into Baja in a more or less continuous manner, as you can see in the image at righ ...read more
(Credit: Alena Hovorkova/shutterstock)
A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation.
The first dance at my wedding lasted exactly four minutes and 52 seconds, but I’ll probably remember it for decades. Neuroscientists still don’t entirely understand this: How was my brain able to translate this less-than-five-minute experience into a lifelong memory? Part of the puzzle is that there’s a gap between experience and memory: our experiences are fleeting, but ...read more
