NASA is often viewed as the epitome of big ideas and extreme planning. But sometimes even they go above and beyond, either with incredible improvised fixes, or missions that survived the test of time and then some.
Hubble Got Glasses
The greatest space telescope astronomers have was almost a giant flop. When the telescope launched in 1991, the pictures it sent back were muddled and far below the predicted quality. It turned out a mirror had been ground to the wrong specifications, leav ...read more
A new paper offers a broad challenge to a certain kind of 'grand theory' about the brain. According to the authors, Federico E. Turkheimer and colleagues, it is problematic to build models of brain function that rely on 'strong emergence'.
Two popular theories, the Free Energy Principle aka Bayesian Brain and the Integrated Information Theory model, are singled out as examples of strong emergence-based work.
Emergence refers to the idea that a system can exhibit behavior or propert ...read more
Massive volumes of water circulate throughout the Atlantic Ocean and serve as the central drivers of Earth’s climate. Now researchers have discovered that the heart of this circulation is not where they suspected.
“The general understanding has been [that it’s] in the Labrador Sea, which sits between the Canadian coast and the west side of Greenland,” said Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the new research. &ldqu ...read more
The Chinese Chang'e-4 lunar mission is returning data again after a scheduled two-week rest period. It's rover, Yutu-2, woke up on January 29, but the Chang'e-4 lander slept in an extra day. The rest mode was necessary due to the frigid nighttime temperatures on the lunar far side, which plunged as low as -310 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Chang'e-4 mission is the first to explore the far side of the moon, and the cold temperatures are part of the discovery process.
Chang'e-4 Disagrees with Ap ...read more
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a small and strangely isolated dwarf galaxy just 30 million light-years away from our own Milky Way. And astronomers say the discovery was completely by accident.
Luigi Bedin, of the Astronomical Observatory of Padua, and his colleagues were using Hubble to study a globular star cluster called NGC 6752. Globular clusters are tightly packed crowds of ancient stars. And when they looked at the images Hubble sent back, they noticed a small galaxy hid ...read more
Spring is one of nature’s greatest performances – a time of rebirth, renewed energy and dramatic transformations. For three consecutive nights, Monday, April 29 – Wednesday, May 1 at 8:00 p.m. ET on PBS, Nature: American Spring LIVE presents the change from winter to spring in real time from iconic locations across America. The series will include a mix of live and pre-taped footage highlighting some of the most pivotal events in nature’s calendar. A divers ...read more
The early solar system was a strange place. Instead of all the planets with which we are so familiar, there were likely lots of small proto-planets and moons competing to get larger and larger. That's because early on, the planets were accreting -- that is, they were being built as bits of rock, dust and gas stuck together due to collisions. The larger the object got, the more pieces would be attracted to it thanks to its increasing gravitational pull.
Eventually, these objects would ...read more
