Despite decades of high-quality observations, many details about our sun are still unknown. Credit: NASA SVS
The fact that the sun is hot should not be news to a single person. The sun’s surface is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems toasty enough. But surrounding the sun is an atmosphere of sorts called the corona. This envelope of superheated gas — plasma, actually — measures more than 3 million degrees. And scientists are still trying to figure out how this o ...read more
Carol Howard, 69, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease six years ago. (Credit: Joel Shurkin)
(Inside Science) — The second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony begins with a minor-key rhythm in the cellos. It sounds like a background rhythm, which it becomes when the violins introduce a second, soaring and entirely different melody. One half the Baltimore Symphony is on stage playing one thing; the other half, another. Next to me, my wife, Carol, le ...read more
Brain organoids in a petri dish. (Credit: UCSD)
Alysson Muotri and his team have been toiling away in the lab for the last year and a half or so, obsessing over bland-looking, pea-sized lumps of cells. Despite their unassuming appearance, lumps like these have taken neuroscience by storm. They’re lab-grown “brains.” Scientists call them brain organoids, and they offer rudimentary 3-D models of the brain’s cortex — the outer layer where complex functions like memor ...read more
Astronomers say the galactic center is home to a black hole (illustration shown) with as much mass as 4 million suns. Its entourage likely includes clusters of stars — many of them orbiting each other in two- or three-star systems — as well as smaller black holes. (Credit: NASA/Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital)
In April, the European Space Agency released the second massive trove of data from Gaia, a spinning, scanning satellite that for nearly five years has been spying on a billion s ...read more
OSIRIS-REx images asteroid Bennu from just 200 miles (330 kilometers) away. (Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)
At long last, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft has delivered an up close and personal view of asteroid Bennu.
This composite image was created from eight shots taken by the craft’s PolyCam camera. Transmitting data back to Earth, researchers used a super-resolution algorithm ...read more
A mosaic image of Mars created from over 100 images taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s. (Credit: Viking Project, USGS, NASA)
For years, astronomers have wondered where the Red Planet got its organic carbon compounds, which are thought to be necessary for life as we know it on Earth. That organic carbon often comes from biological sources on Earth, but researchers have been working to figure out how they’re created on Mars. Now, a new analysis of Martian meteorites indicates that the o ...read more
This artist’s concept shows the Dawn Spacecraft in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
Eleven years ago, NASA launched the Dawn spacecraft toward our main asteroid belt, bound for its two largest rocky worlds. In 2011, Dawn arrived at Vesta, then made its way to Ceres in 2015. After becoming the first spacecraft to orbit two worlds beyond Earth, as well as the first to visit a dwarf planet — arriving at Ceres just months before New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto ...read more
The gut microbiome may be an important window to our health and understanding the obesity epidemic. (Credit: Anatomy Insider/Shutterstock)
Immigrating to another country changes everything — including your gut bacteria.
When immigrants and refugees move to the United States, their gut microbiome rapidly Westernizes and becomes less diverse, according to a new study that analyzed the effects of migration on Hmong and Karen immigrant communities in Minnesota. Their findings ...read more
A time-lapse created by astronomer Yvette Cendes shows the shockwave of Supernova 1987A expanding outward and crashing into debris. (Credit: Yvette Cendes, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto)
Astronomers have been captivated by Supernova 1987A — the death of a supergiant star about 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud — since it was first spotted in the night sky in 1987.
Supernova 1987A remains the brightest supernova hu ...read more
Human cells infected with human papillomavirus. (Credit: Komsan Loonprom/Shutterstock)
One version of the human papillomavirus, which leads to most cases of cervical cancer, evolved in humans as a result of sex with Neanderthal, a new study shows.
The American Cancer Society estimates more than 13,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer this year and 30 percent will die from the disease. HPV is responsible for nearly every case of cervical cance ...read more
