A paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal makes the suggestion that physicist Stephen Hawking's disability, which famously confined him to a wheelchair and robbed him of his speech, was psychosomatic in nature.
Hmm. I think this says more about the author than it does about Hawking.
The paper is called Delusional Health Beliefs and it comes by British doctor Peter May. It was published a few days ago in the Medico-Legal Journal.
May begins the paper by discussing conversion di ...read more
Heading to the beach this weekend? Consider engaging in water quality testing with the Surfrider Foundation. The Surfrider Foundation is a grassroots environmental organization whose mission is to protect and enjoy the world’s ocean, waves, and beaches.
Surfrider volunteers work in their communities across the country testing the water to provide more information to inform safe beach recreation. The Blue Water Task Force (BWTF) is the Surfrider Foundation’s volunteer-run ...read more
Violent thunderstorms boiled up across Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri on May 22, 2019, as seen in this animation of infrared images acquired by the GOES-16 weather satellite. Tornadoes, including one that ravaged parts of Jefferson City, MO, are indicated by blue-colored T's. (Note: The animation may take awhile to load. It's worth the wait! Source: CIMSS Satellite Blog)
It certainly has been a wild — and deadly — few weeks for weather.
Since the first and 23rd of May, 340 torna ...read more
The series of paper cells developed by researchers at the University of Washington uses origami folds to absorb the force of impacts. (Credit: Kiyomi Taguchi/University of Washington)
Whether applied to auto collisions or rocket landings, absorbing energy from impacts is a valuable trait, and industries have been working on various solutions for years. For spacecraft, landing safely has entailed everything from inflatable airbag systems to sky cranes to retro-thrusters. But what if the force ...read more
Sara Futch, a graduate student at North Carolina State University, won Best Overall Poster at the Citizen Science Association Conference 2019 for her poster, “Uncovering Connections across Citizen Science Projects: A Social Network Analysis.” Conference attendees selected Sara’s poster via in-person votes during the poster session.
Sara Futch's poster
Here’s more from Sara about her research:
“My name is Sara Futch, and I’m a graduate student in F ...read more
Radar reveals that Mars is hiding past ice caps under the ones visible today. (Credit: SA/DLR/FU Berlin; NASA MGS MOLA Science Team)
Bands of ice and sand at Mars' north pole reveal an ancient climate that swung between warm and cold.
Mars, now dry and dusty, still holds water ice at its poles, and evidence strongly suggests it was once a planet where water flowed freely across the surface.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Shallow Radar (SHARAD) has peered deep into the northern ...read more
(Credit: Choksawatdikorn/Shutterstock)
Some of the smallest creatures in the sea are also some of the most influential. Plankton, a group of microscopic marine organisms that includes bacteria, amoebas and snail larvae, among other things, prop up the base of the oceanic food chain. Every sea creature, from clownfish to whales, ultimately depend on plankton for food.
Now, a new study that peers into a past before human influence shows climate change has upset the distribution of plankton ...read more
The power and propulsion system for the Lunar Gateway will be built by Maxar. Courtesy of Business Wire)
In a talk at the Florida Institute of Technology on Thursday, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that Maxar Technologies will build the first stage of NASA’s planned Lunar Gateway.
The Gateway, part of NASA's larger Artemis program to return to the moon, is meant to be a waystation of sorts placed in a long orbit around the moon. It will provide a habitat for astronaut ...read more
The telescope, once complete, will be made of hundreds of spherical detectors suspended at the bottom of the sea. (Credit: KM3NeT)
Deep under the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of watchful eyes hang suspended on cables, waiting for a rare and valuable flash. Their quarry are ghostly neutrino particles, capable of tunneling through light-years of space and a planet's worth of rock without ever coming into contact with matter.
But, here, under the ocean, they just might hit a detector from the ...read more
In the final minutes of Apollo 11’s descent to the lunar surface, five 1201 and 1202 alarms blared in the lunar module. The computer was overloaded with data, and for a brief moment it looked like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t land on the Moon. As we know, they did; Apollo 11 got a GO to land in spite of the alarms. What we don’t know is the man whose work allowed the crew reboot the computer and save the landing: Hal Laning.
https://youtu.be/LELUXyVDOKk ...read more
