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The Kilopower small nuclear reactor could be tested on the moon in the coming years. (Credit: NASA) The future of space exploration may rest in the hands of a group of Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers. They’ve built the first of a new generation of small nuclear reactors intended to power missions to deep space and even future astronaut bases on the moon and Mars. Called Kilopower, their project aims to achieve a longstanding dream of the space community: a safe, effective, and ...read more

On Twitter, I was pointed to the strange story of Brain Armor®, a nutritional supplement which is supposed to promote brain health. While there are many supplements that are sold for the same purpose, Brain Armor has a unique claim to fame: it is the official brain health supplement of Pro Football Legends (PFL), the “commercial marketing arm of the NFL Alumni.” Brain Armor’s links to the NFL Alumni raised eyebrows on Twitter because the NFL has famously been the target o ...read more

Scientists gave mice brain injuries (this particular mouse was not involved) and then watched how fast they recovered. They found that active mice recovered faster than ones given rest. (Credit: Kirill Kurashov/shutterstock) Conventional wisdom advocates for rest after suffering an injury. Now researchers have discovered that activity — not rest — helps the brain recover from trauma in mice. The finding suggests that challenging the brain early after damage can speed up healing. &l ...read more

The Milky Way Galaxy. (Credit: Serge Brunier) Mapping our galaxy’s formation and evolution would be pretty easy if stars just stayed in their birthplaces, but unfortunately that’s not the case. The Milky Way’s vast pool of stars is constantly expanding outward, getting knocked out of their orbits, and generally evolving alongside our galaxy. Sure, this makes for an exciting stellar journey, but these gradual movements make it difficult to pinpoint a star’s origins ...read more

CBD oil. (Credit: ELRoi/Shutterstock) One of the most controversial drugs in America can’t even get you high. Derived from marijuana, CBD, or cannabidiol, could help treat a range of medical conditions, early research suggests — but its Schedule I status has made it hard to study, leaving researchers and patients in the dark. Although it’s usually found as an oil, CBD can be infused into snacks and drinks, or come in transdermal patches, vaporizers, suppositories, and concent ...read more

A dog buried at the site of Pad’ Kalasnikova in Siberia. This dog was buried in a crouched or sitting position. (Credit: Losey RJ, Garvie-Lok S, Leonard JA, Katzenberg MA, Germonpre´ M, et al. (2013) Burying Dogs in Ancient Cis-Baikal, Siberia: Temporal Trends and Relationships with Human Diet and Subsistence Practices. PLoS ONE 8(5): e63740. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063740) As a kid, when my pet turtle died we had a funeral — of course — and buried him in the backyard ...read more

(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