The Milky Way Galaxy. (Credit: Serge Brunier)
Mapping our galaxy’s formation and evolution would be pretty easy if stars just stayed in their birthplaces, but unfortunately that’s not the case. The Milky Way’s vast pool of stars is constantly expanding outward, getting knocked out of their orbits, and generally evolving alongside our galaxy. Sure, this makes for an exciting stellar journey, but these gradual movements make it difficult to pinpoint a star’s origins ...read more
CBD oil. (Credit: ELRoi/Shutterstock)
One of the most controversial drugs in America can’t even get you high. Derived from marijuana, CBD, or cannabidiol, could help treat a range of medical conditions, early research suggests — but its Schedule I status has made it hard to study, leaving researchers and patients in the dark.
Although it’s usually found as an oil, CBD can be infused into snacks and drinks, or come in transdermal patches, vaporizers, suppositories, and concent ...read more
A dog buried at the site of Pad’ Kalasnikova in Siberia. This dog was buried in a crouched or sitting position. (Credit: Losey RJ, Garvie-Lok S, Leonard JA, Katzenberg MA, Germonpre´ M, et al. (2013) Burying Dogs in Ancient Cis-Baikal, Siberia: Temporal Trends and Relationships with Human Diet and Subsistence Practices. PLoS ONE 8(5): e63740. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063740)
As a kid, when my pet turtle died we had a funeral — of course — and buried him in the backyard ...read more
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
Nothing is normal on Ceres — least of all its mud volcanoes.
In new research published in Nature Astronomy, a large team of astronomers has laid out a new view of the weirdest world in our solar system. It seems that Ceres has had a busy last few billion years — including random smatterings of volcanism, but of a type seen nowhere else in the solar system.
Ceres is the largest world in the asteroid belt, and is believed to be a remnant pr ...read more
A fun new paper looks at the changing landscape of neuroimaging research through an analysis of the journals Neuroimage and PNAS. The article comes from UPenn researchers Jordan D. Dworkin, Russell T. Shinohara and Danielle S. Bassett.
Dworkin et al. created a network analysis of keywords from the 8,547 Neuroimage papers that were published between 2008 and 2017. This analysis produces a graph in which the nodes are keywords (topics) and the edges (connections) reflect the tendency for those ke ...read more
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is designed to hunt for planets among nearby bright stars. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)
In just six weeks of science observations, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has already found 50 possible new worlds for scientists to examine.
TESS finds planets by watching the dip in light as a planet passes in front of its parent star. It began science observations on July 25 and the first set of informati ...read more
NASA’s ICESat-2 spacecraft will measure the height of Earth’s melting ice. (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
Since 2003, NASA has been monitoring the height of Earth’s ice with lasers. This undertaking began with a satellite — the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — which ran through 2009. Operation IceBridge has used planes to monitor specific vulnerable ice sheets in the years since. Now, the project continues with ICESat-2, which launch ...read more
A computer-generated Opportunity explores Burns Cliff on Mars.(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell)
Since June 10, the 14-year-old Opportunity rover has been silent, presumably sleeping as thick dust clouds blocked the Sun from its solar cells. But now, that sky is clearing, and NASA is implementing a listening plan for the rover through January 2019.
Without power, the rover has likely experienced several faults. Among them, its mission clock may have stopped recording time accurately. To counte ...read more
Space Force, Trump’s proposed sixth military branch that would be responsible for all defence activity in space, has been met with mixed reviews, to say the least. But keen-eyed space fans will recognize that this is neither the first time America has proposed a military space program nor is it the case that space is free of military activity. So let’s look at the long history of military activity in space.
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For anyone outside the US, the five existin ...read more
An Aldabra giant tortoise. (Credit: Ivan Hlobej/shutterstock)
Turtles survived the massive extinction event that took out the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago. But climate change, habitat loss and exploitation from the commercial pet industry have now decimated global turtle populations.
Of the 356 turtle species scientists know about today, more than half are endangered or have already gone extinct. As their numbers continue to decline, scientists say their loss will alter ecosystems ...read more
