Hayabusa2’s view of Ryugu as the craft descended towards the asteroid October 15, 2018 in the first of two touchdown rehearsals. (Credit: JAXA)
This past summer, Hayabusa2 — a spacecraft, operated by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA, sent to collect and return asteroid samples — arrived at asteroid Ryugu. Today, the craft comes close to the asteroid in the first of two touchdown rehearsals.
After reaching the asteroid on June 27, Hayabusa2 primarily observed Ryugu from “Th ...read more
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory went into Safe Mode on October 10. An investigation is underway to find the reason why. (Credit: NASA/CXC)
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will soon be observing the cosmos once again, the space agency said Monday. A scare last week left the spacecraft in safe mode. Chandra is a space observatory that observes extreme objects that emit X-rays, like black holes. The problems with Chandra surfaced on October 10, just days after the iconic Hubble Space ...read more
This week, we discuss kidnappings & gunpoint attacks demanding cryptocurrency. We often say that cryptocurrency is unseizable. But in one sense, it’s actually more seizable than dollars in your bank account: Kidnappers’ crypto accounts, unlike bank accounts, are unfreezable and are themselves unseizable — making stolen funds completely unrecoverable.
What can we do to be safe from ransom and wrench attacks?
Bitgenstein’s Table is a narrative podcast with m ...read more
A new review paper in The Neuroscientist highlights the problem of body movements for neuroscience, from blinks to fidgeting.
Authors Patrick J Drew and colleagues of Penn State discuss how many types of movements are associated with widespread brain activation, which can contaminate brain activity recordings. This is true, they say, of both humans and experimental animals such as rodents, e.g. with their ‘whisking’ movements of the whiskers.
A particular concern is that many moveme ...read more
Neil Armstrong (left) as portrayed by Ryan Gosling in First Man (Credit: Universal)
First Man is not like other movies about the space race, and I mean that in a very good way.
I’ll admit, I was skeptical about the director of La La Land telling the story of Neil Armstrong’s historic landing on the Moon. (Would there be songs? A scowling J.K. Simmons?) It turns out to be a synergistic pairing of artist and material. First Man brushes aside the expected saga of space cowboys saddlin ...read more
This animation shows how sea surface temperatures have departed from the long-term average, from August through early October 2018. (Animation by climate.gov; data from NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Lab.)
It’s still not here yet, but El Niño sure looks like it’s coming.
In its latest forecast, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there is a 70 to 75 percent chance that El Niño will form “in the next couple of months and cont ...read more
The D. lab corals, if they make it to adulthood, will have to survive in the world as it is: a world in which the climate is changing, the ocean is acidifying, and the forces of politics and history affect both land and sea. Curaçao, a former Dutch colony, became a separate country in 2010, but it remains part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which oversees its foreign policy.
For almost two centuries, the island was a hub of the Dutch slave trade, and like other Caribbean cou ...read more
All of the galaxies we see in the distant universe are speeding away from us. This clue led Lemaitre to the idea of an expanding universe: the Big Bang. Credit: NASA/ESA/H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech)/A. Koekemoer (STScI)/R. Windhorst (Arizona State University)/Z. Levay (STScI)
In 1927, a prescient astronomer named Georges Lemaître looked at data showing how galaxies move. He noticed something peculiar – all of them appeared to be speeding away from Earth. Not only that, ...read more
The leprosy bacteria. (Credit: Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock)
For the past 25 years, Anura Rambukkana has been studying a disease that’s already been cured. He studies leprosy, a disease that was once the scourge of humanity before a course of drugs developed in the mid-20th century brought it under control.
For decades, he’s worked in a field that sees little funding and few new faces, and many of his contemporaries have moved on to higher-profile projects involving diseases that attr ...read more
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has a hazy atmosphere – seen here in the box on the left. (Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Space Science Institute, Caltech)
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere. One new research collaboration has identified a chemical mechanism that could help to explain how the moon’s haze formed.
Titan’s Haze
“Both space probes and land-based instruments have identified the chemical composition of th ...read more
