A view acquired by the new GOES-East satellite on Monday, Dec. 18, 2017. Click on the image to see the latest view of the Continental United States. And then hit the Play button on the left of that web page to watch an animation of recent images. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA/SLIDER) A brand spanking new advanced U.S. satellite is now fully operational and monitoring weather, wildfires, lightning and other phenomena. The satellite formerly known as GOES-16, now renamed GOES-East and fully ope ...read more

Fruit fly. (Credit: ELDIE AARON JUSTIM/Shutterstock) Mind-controlling parasites are the stuff of nightmares and blockbuster horror movies, yet organisms that turn normally sensible creatures into zombies are all too real. Most of the microbes and fungi that do this are restricted to the insect world, luckily, though those cases are gruesome enough. Ants with fungal spores growing from their heads, cockroaches eaten from the inside by parasitic wasp larva, fish driven to suicide-by-bird &m ...read more

This schlieren image shows an Air Force Test Pilot School T-38 in a transonic state, meaning the aircraft is transitioning from a subsonic speed to supersonic. Above and beneath the aircraft, shockwaves are seen starting to form. (Credit: NASA) NASA wants to make sonic booms a little less…boom-y. When a jet breaks the sound barrier, it generates shockwaves that are eventually heard—and felt—on the ground as sonic booms. The boisterous nature of supersonic flight is one of th ...read more

The tiny little yellow guy is the actual flower. The red bits are leaves. (Credit: Scott Bauer/USDA) Poinsettias are a holiday icon. Their crimson colors are so commonplace this time of year that they practically blend into the background. And once the holidays are over, they’ll disappear like so many Christmas trees. But these seemingly boring flowers actually hide a fascinating history. Poinsettias owe their holiday prevalence to some weird quirks of evolution — and one clever So ...read more

Space may look vast, but it’s actually pretty crowded near Earth. As of a couple of years ago, more than 1,300 active satellites orbited Earth, in addition to tens of thousands of dead satellites, discarded rockets and other bits and pieces that have accumulated in space in the 60 years since Sputnik, ranging in size from softballs to school buses. When we turn on a new radar in a few years that can see even smaller pieces, we are going to see millions of them. And it’s going to con ...read more

An animation of satellite imagery offers a revealing perspective on the day-by-day growth of the Thomas Fire False-color imagery from NASA’s Terra satellite reveals the growth of the Thomas Fire from Dec. 4 through the 16th. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman) “Firefighters achieved huge successes yesterday during a BIG firefight to hold their line & SAVED hundreds of homes in Montecito.” That was the news this morning about the horrific Thomas ...read more

A Nature News feature examines academic papers that have never been cited. According to author Richard Van Noorden, by some estimates up to half of all papers have yet to receive their first citation 5 years after publication, and even 10% of Nobel Prizewinners’ papers go uncited. However, Van Noorden reports that these estimates are far too high. For recent papers indexed on Web of Science (WoS), “records suggest that fewer than 10%” remain uncited, and even this is likely an ...read more