NEEMO 23 crew members test out a prototype of the LESA device. (Credit: ESA/NASA)
This week, astronauts and scientists are venturing under the sea as part of NEEMO-23, the 23rd expedition of the NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations. NEEMO sends specialists to Aquarius, an underwater research station located 3.5 miles off the coast of Key Largo in Florida, and 62 feet under the surface.
Thanks to the buoyancy of seawater and the sandy seafloor,
the area around Aquarius is a ...read more
A flooded rice field. Microbes in the soil release methane when rice fields are flooded, adding to greenhouse gas emissions. (Credit: Jet Rockkk/.Shutterstock)
The real impact of climate change depends on tiny organisms we can’t even see, argues an international panel of more than 30 microbiologists in a consensus statement published Tuesday.
Microbes, or microorganisms, are any organism or virus invisible to the naked eye. Numbering in the nonillions (in the U.S., that’s 10,0 ...read more
(Credit: SewCream/Shutterstock)
When it comes to medical diagnoses, Alzheimer’s is a grim one. Those who develop the disease, which causes ever-worsening memory and behavioral problems, don’t have many treatment options. There are a handful of drugs that can ease symptoms, but none of them slow down the disease’s progression or offer a cure. But one approach, outside the realm of drugs and medications, is quickly showing some strong potential for treatment -- fasting.
Typ ...read more
The robot fish in its natural environment. (Credit: James Pikul)
When it comes to designing better gizmos, efficiency is the name of the game. Why have two separate components to do two separate tasks, if you can have one do both? We have a whole bird-killing metaphor about how great it is to be efficient.
Well, what’s good for the goose, it turns out, is also good
for the robot fish.
A team of engineers at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania have created a soft fish-shap ...read more
The James Webb Space Telescope -- minus the telescope -- recently underwent another round of testing. (Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn)
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s long-planned – and long-delayed – successor to Hubble. But after a recent spate of testing to mimic the extremes of space, it’s looking like the telescope is still on track for its 2021 launch date.
The telescope itself, along with its instrumentation, passed many of its final tests last year ...read more
(Credit: POLIGOONE/Shutterstock)
I don’t know who said “you are what you eat,” but it really doesn’t make sense. I am objectively not made of peanut butter and coffee, though I’m certain that would be my fate if the sentiment were true. That said, the general idea — that what we eat matters — seems to hold more and more weight as studies of our diet pile up. Now, researchers say there's yet another wrinkle to the question of what to eat, one rooted in ...read more
Wildfires blazing in Siberia, as seen by one of the Sentinel 2 satellites on June 11th. (Source: Copernicus Sentinel image data processed by Pierre Markuse)
I started writing this post last week after seeing the stunning satellite image above showing a blazing Siberian wildfire.
When I returned to finish the post today, I learned from a story in the Siberian Times that wildfires in this part of Russia's Sakha Republic are now threatening a spectacular landscape feature known among locals ...read more
A section of limestone riddled with burrows bored by a unique rock-eating shipworm. (Credit: Shipway et al 2019, Proc. R. Soc. B 20190434. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0434)
What would a shipworm do if a shipworm didn't eat wood? The humble bivalve has long had outsized influence on both its environment and even the global economy. That's because, until now, every known species consumes wood, sometimes with destructive results.
A shipworm species new to science, however, tunnels th ...read more
One honeybee, ah ah ah... (Credit: yod67/Shutterstock)
Humans, monkeys, pigeons, fish and honeybees can all grasp the concept of a greater than or less than sign and choose between bigger or smaller quantities. Now, new research from a team led by Martin Giurfa at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France is the first to show that honeybees, like other vertebrates, can also recognize a specific value, not just a relative value. That means they know the number 3, instead of s ...read more
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections were more common when the sun was younger, but it may still have been quieter than many other stars like it. (Credit: NASA/SDO)
Stars, like humans, are more volatile when they’re young. As sunlike stars mature past their first billion years, they all tend to slow in their rotation, eventually converging to roughly the same period we see now in our sun: about 27 days for a star the same mass as our sun.
But when stars are young, they rotate mor ...read more
