(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA) Nothing is normal on Ceres — least of all its mud volcanoes. In new research published in Nature Astronomy, a large team of astronomers has laid out a new view of the weirdest world in our solar system. It seems that Ceres has had a busy last few billion years — including random smatterings of volcanism, but of a type seen nowhere else in the solar system. Ceres is the largest world in the asteroid belt, and is believed to be a remnant pr ...read more

A fun new paper looks at the changing landscape of neuroimaging research through an analysis of the journals Neuroimage and PNAS. The article comes from UPenn researchers Jordan D. Dworkin, Russell T. Shinohara and Danielle S. Bassett. Dworkin et al. created a network analysis of keywords from the 8,547 Neuroimage papers that were published between 2008 and 2017. This analysis produces a graph in which the nodes are keywords (topics) and the edges (connections) reflect the tendency for those ke ...read more

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is designed to hunt for planets among nearby bright stars. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) In just six weeks of science observations, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has already found 50 possible new worlds for scientists to examine. TESS finds planets by watching the dip in light as a planet passes in front of its parent star. It began science observations on July 25 and the first set of informati ...read more

NASA’s ICESat-2 spacecraft will measure the height of Earth’s melting ice. (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) Since 2003, NASA has been monitoring the height of Earth’s ice with lasers. This undertaking began with a satellite — the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — which ran through 2009. Operation IceBridge has used planes to monitor specific vulnerable ice sheets in the years since. Now, the project continues with ICESat-2, which launch ...read more

A computer-generated Opportunity explores Burns Cliff on Mars.(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell) Since June 10, the 14-year-old Opportunity rover has been silent, presumably sleeping as thick dust clouds blocked the Sun from its solar cells. But now, that sky is clearing, and NASA is implementing a listening plan for the rover through January 2019. Without power, the rover has likely experienced several faults. Among them, its mission clock may have stopped recording time accurately. To counte ...read more

Space Force, Trump’s proposed sixth military branch that would be responsible for all defence activity in space, has been met with mixed reviews, to say the least. But keen-eyed space fans will recognize that this is neither the first time America has proposed a military space program nor is it the case that space is free of military activity. So let’s look at the long history of military activity in space. [embedded content] For anyone outside the US, the five existin ...read more

An Aldabra giant tortoise. (Credit: Ivan Hlobej/shutterstock) Turtles survived the massive extinction event that took out the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago. But climate change, habitat loss and exploitation from the commercial pet industry have now decimated global turtle populations. Of the 356 turtle species scientists know about today, more than half are endangered or have already gone extinct. As their numbers continue to decline, scientists say their loss will alter ecosystems ...read more

Cosmology is the story of the fundamental particles, forces, and energies that shape and govern our universe. And that story is one of rhythm and motion. (Credit: Paul M. Sutter/Youtube) For millennia, cosmological and religious systems of thought were intertwined—and usually indistinguishable. European artwork of, say, the arrangements of planets and stars often went hand-in-hand with theological guides, and not a little bit of moralizing. But then Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo ...read more

(Credit: Extreme Weather/Kellie Jaeger) The citizens of Galveston, Texas, had achieved unprecedented economic prosperity. The city, built on a shallow, sandy island 2 miles (1.2 kilometers) offshore, had become the state’s leading center of trade, exporting some 1.7 million bales of cotton annually. At the turn of the century, the city stood in the doorway to an even more prosperous future. This all changed September 8, 1900, when an unusually high tide and long, rolling sea swells gave ...read more

Miniature biomanufacturing kits like this prototype could revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry. (Credit: Amino Labs, CC BY-ND) Soon after Federick Banting discovered that insulin could be used to treat diabetes in 1921, he sold the patent to the University of Toronto for about a dollar. Banting received the Nobel prize because his discovery meant a life-saving drug could become widely available. Nearly a century later, an American with diabetes can pay as much as US$400 per month for insu ...read more