Frances "Poppy" Northcutt at work in the Mission Planning and Analysis room at NASA's Mission Control (Houston) during the Apollo program, circa 1968.
The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 came and went in a blaze of nostalgia for the moment when humans made their first awkward footfall on another world--a moment when (for the true believers, at least) it seemed like humans might keep going and start exploring the whole solar system in person. But Apollo was about much more than Apollo 11, and ...read more
Many older people and their families worry about a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. (Credit: Nadya Chetah/Shutterstock)
Many people who have problems with their memory, especially if they are elderly, worry that they have Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts at least 5.5 million people in the U.S. and brings tremendous burdens to families as well. This concern is paramount among those who have seen a family member, friend or colleague develop this insidious progressive disease.
...read more
The galaxies are clear to ALMA’s radio vision, but disappear in Hubble’s visible light coverage. (Credit: Image (c) 2019 Wang et al.)
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, but scientists have trouble seeing back to its earliest days. This cosmic dawn has been obscured by time, distance, and the rest of the universe. Part of the problem is that light gets stretched as it travels across the cosmos. The longer the journey, the more stretched out its wavelengths become.
So our e ...read more
A computer model of Earth's magnetic field. (Credit: U.S. Department of Energy)
North, I was once surprised to learn, is not always north. There’s geographic north, “up” on maps toward the North Pole, and then there’s magnetic north, which is where compass needles point. Right now the two kind of line up, but that isn’t always the case. Earth’s magnetic field — which guides compasses, animals and auroras — likes to wander, and it’s reverse ...read more
Photo by NASA/JPL-CalTech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin Gill
Looking a bit like earthly thunderheads, a white band of high-altitude clouds emerge above the colorful, swirling patterns of Jupiter in a photo taken last summer by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, has no Earth-like surface. Instead of an outer crust, the gas giant consists mainly of hydrogen and helium that condenses into liquid the deeper you go, all wrapped in an atmosphere of clouds made up of ...read more
The dense cores of past planets might survive a star’s expansion period into its white dwarf phase. (Credit: CfA/Mark A. Garlick)
In five or six billion years, our sun will expand into a red giant star hundreds of times larger than it is now. It will envelop Mercury and Venus, and possibly Earth as well, and then slowly puff away its outer layers. The hot, dense core left behind is called a white dwarf. And it will glow for billions of years.
It’s an open question what happens ...read more
Image by Alex Thornton
Despite a spirograph-like appearance, these loops and twists actually represent the flight paths and wingbeats of a flock of jackdaws, members of the wily crow family that mate for life. Researchers had thought that each member of a flock flew independently of their mates, allowing them to pay close attention to others and rapidly communicate to evade predators.
But new research in Cornwall, England, found that jackdaws stick with their mates as they fly, a sweet ...read more
A reconstruction of the newly-discovered giant parrot Heracles, dwarfing a
group of small New Zealand wrens on the forest floor. (Credit: Illustration by Dr Brian Choo, Flinders University)
If you tried to feed a cracker to this
polly you might lose a hand in the process. Paleontologists say they’ve
discovered the ancient fossil remains of the world’s only known giant parrot.
The bird stood roughly 3 feet high. And scientists
speculate it could’ve weighed as much as 15 ...read more
(Credit: Nick Fewings/Unsplash)
You swallow your last bite of lunch and head back to your desk. A stack of papers awaits you, and you’re just easing into work mode when suddenly you’re ambushed by a sudden, inexplicable hankering for potato chips. Every trace of productivity vanishes from your mind, replaced by an inexplicable fixation on that crisp, salty snack. But you just ate ... you can’t be hungry already, right?
For decades, the popular narrative of “the wisd ...read more
(Credit: Artemida-psy/Shutterstock)
In 2008, gastroenterologist Colleen Kelly had a patient with a recurring and debilitating infection of the gut with a microbe called Clostridioides difficile. Nothing Kelly did could ease the woman’s severe abdominal cramping and diarrhea.
So Kelly — at her patient’s urging — decided to try something highly experimental: transplanting a fecal sample from a healthy donor into the large intestine. And it worked.
Kelly, of Brown ...read more
