Before it plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn on its final death dive, the Cassini spacecraft made 22 orbits of the planet that followed a path no probe had taken before: It flew between the massive planet and its rings. During those final orbits, Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) spotted water ice and complex organic molecules flowing from the rings to the atmosphere of the planet: ring rain. But it turns out, “ring rain is more like a ring downpour,” accord ...read more

Over its nearly 20 year mission, NASA's Cassini spacecraft redefined our understanding of Saturn. And while Cassini sent its final transmissions to Earth as it dove into the ringed planet last September, scientists have just published more than half a dozen papers using data collected during its "Grand Finale." The studies, published in both Science and the Geophysical Research Letters help refine our knowledge of the planet and its rings and how they evolved. Planetary scientist Hunter ...read more

The piercing blue eyes of huskies — those beloved, wolf-like canines — stand out among most dog breeds. Now, using genetic tests, scientists find where blue-eyed Siberian huskies get their distinctive eye color. The researchers say this marks another step in our understanding of canine genetics. “This is the first discovery that’s been made this way outside of humans,” said Adam Boyko, a genomics researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and co-founder o ...read more

It’s a big week for CRISPR! Despite being a world apart, two separate research groups had the same idea: to see if CRISPR gene editing can really mimic conventional plant breeding. One group re-domesticated a wild tomato plant; the other used a similar approach to domesticate an entirely new crop: the ground cherry, a tomato relative. Together, the new work demonstrates how dramatically gene editing technology could speed up crop improvement efforts worldwide. How to Make a Crop Worth ...read more

Researchers have taught a population of wild sparrows to sing a different song. Out today in Current Biology, the research suggests new answers to the question of how birds learn to sing. “This was a risky experiment we conducted because we didn’t know if it was going to work,” says Dan Mennill, lead author of the study. Mennill explains that song learning has been studied for years in controlled laboratory settings. But it’s much more difficult to run an experime ...read more

It's not easy being a bee these days. Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee, is crucial to agriculture worldwide but faces a growing number of pests and pathogens against which beekeepers have few weapons. But the bees themselves may be showing us the way forward: New research suggests the foraging insects may obtain protection against some viruses by consuming fungi, then returning to the hive to spread its medicinal value. Honey bees contribute more than $15 billion annually to U.S ...read more

At vast cosmic distances, supermassive black holes called quasars gobble up matter into accretion disks that shine so brightly, they overpower the light from entire galaxies. Closer to home, compact objects called microquasars give astronomers a scaled-down taste of the processes at work inside the faraway behemoths. Now, an international collaboration of researchers has announced in the journal Nature that they’ve detected the first gamma-ray signal from the ends of the two jets spewing o ...read more

The Milky Way is apparently a hotspot for stars immigrating from other galaxies. In a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a trio of astronomers set out to find hypervelocity stars fleeing our galaxy, but surprisingly discovered most of the rapidly moving stars are actually barreling into the Milky Way from galaxies beyond. "Rather than flying away from the [Milky Way's] Galactic Center, most of the high velocity stars we spotted seem to be racing ...read more

Arguments with loved ones or a stressful conversation with the boss can bring you down. Now, new research provides scientific evidence that getting a hug on the same day you’ve had a conflict can lift your spirits. The finding suggests hugs are a simple yet effective way to relieve relationship stress, romantic or not. People commonly communicate affection by hugging, holding hands, or even a pat on the back. And past research shows physical contact has psychological and physical hea ...read more

The MASCOT has landed. As of two weeks ago, humans had never put a single robotic explorer on an asteroid. Now we have three of them hopping about on Ryugu, a 900-meter-wide object currently orbiting on the other side of the Sun. On September 20, Japan's Hayabusa2 probe dropped two little landers, MINERVA II-1a and II-1b. They promptly sent back dizzying images from the surface. Then last night (October 3), the mothership deployed MASCOT, a much larger rover that is now performing a batte ...read more