The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is one of the most beautiful cosmic sights that a southern observer can take in with their naked eye. At just over 150,000 light-years from Earth, this large(ish) satellite galaxy of the Milky Way is roughly 14,000 light-years wide and bursting with newly formed stars.
Recently, astronomers homed in on a particularly fertile region of the LMC named LHA 120-N 180B — informally known as N180 B. This nebula, which serves as a sort of stellar nursery, is chock ...read more
Honey bees are a great study system to learn about the animal kingdom. They dance (albeit sloppily), they make jelly that turns their larvae into queens, they have crazy tongues … I could go on. Now, researchers have found, honeybees can add.
In a paper out today in Science Advances, a team led by Adrian Dyer at RMIT University in Melbourne put the honey-makers’ arithmetic skills to the test. Instead of written numbers and symbols, they used colors to communicate with the bees. Blu ...read more
More than 21 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, a profound mental illness that interrupts thinking, language and perception. Quite a few schizophrenic people experience delusions and hear voices. Many of the disease’s symptoms stem from faulty communication between brain cells. And, for decades, scientists have searched for a cure in the brain.
Now researchers say they've discovered that the way to heal schizophrenia might be through the gut. There's an ecosystem of bacte ...read more
While many people think of cancer as a modern plague, researchers continue to find examples of tumors in animals much older than our own species. Discovery of bone cancer in a very early member of the turtle lineage, which lived 240 million years ago, reveals new information about the disease and just how long it's been a scourge to living things.
The aggressive osteosarcoma was found in the femur of Pappochelys rosinae, a roughly 240 million-year-old reptile. Though you might m ...read more
Imagine lying in a hospital bed, conscious, but unable to convey that to the world around you. For sufferers of strokes, traumatic brain injuries or the ever-terrifying locked-in syndrome, it’s not just nightmare fuel — it's reality for some patients. What’s potentially more frightening is that neuroscience hasn’t landed on a way to truly test for consciousness. That's not for a lack of trying. But a new paper published in Science Advances could help pave the way for ...read more
Every year, NASA recognizes astronauts who lost their lives in the pursuit of spaceflight with an official Day of Remembrance. This year, it's celebrated Feb. 7. And NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. Another wreath-laying ceremony will also happen at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Mirror Memorial. Both ceremonies will also include observances for NASA’s lost explorers.
The three great disasters ...read more
When NASA's InSight mission reached Mars last year, it wasn’t alone. It was accompanied by two tiny satellites called CubeSats, or in this case, MarCO, for Mars Cube One. They were the first CubeSats ever to visit the Red Planet. The pair, nicknamed EVE and WALL-E, after Pixar’s fictional robots, relayed information from InSight’s descent. But their real mission was simply to show off their abilities so far from home and prove that such small missions – the total MarCO pr ...read more
Babies, many people agree, are pretty interesting. Not because of their personalities (although, to be sure, some babies are great wits), but because of everything going on in their little baby brains. The complex and intricate processing power of an adult brain is literally taking shape within a newborn’s head, as experiences and sensory input forge new neural connections. And if a baby is missing one of those senses — say, hearing — it’s reasonable to think her brain wo ...read more
Now here's a paper with an interesting title: The dark matter of the brain
Author Saak V. Ovsepian argues that "the great majority of nerve cells in the intact brain do not fire action potentials, i.e., are permanently silent." This is a remarkable claim, and it raises the question of what these silent neurons are doing. However, I didn't find myself convinced of the existence of this 'dark matter'.
Ovsepian points out that numerous studies have found that only a minority of the ne ...read more
