The Iris Nebula is captured here by Spitzer. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in 2003 on a mission to spend five years exploring the cosmos in infrared light. That means it excels at capturing images and chemical signatures of warm objects, like the glow of gas in nebulas and galaxies, or the composition of planets in still-forming alien solar systems. It even found a new ring of Saturn.
In recent years, it’s been operating with just one instrum ...read more
(Credit: Ehrman Photographic/Shutterstock)
(Inside Science) -- A gangrene-inducing bite in Africa, 40 years of curiosity, and backyard experiments her daughters still complain about have all come together to tell Alison Cobb one thing: Stripes help zebras keep their cool. New research published this week in the Journal of Natural History shows stripes may create air flows that give zebras a kind of natural air conditioning system that helps them ward off the blazing s ...read more
(Credit: Willrow Hood/Shutterstock)
Let's say I have an idea for a great invention one day — a series of pneumatic tubes that would shoot pods with people inside between cities at hundreds of miles an hour. My "Superloop" sounds like a sure-fire hit, but I don't have the resources to pull the project off, and what's more, the technology to build it isn't actually there yet.
But I don't want someone with more money to come along and snag the invention from me — I did do the hard ...read more
Cassini's view of Saturn on January 2, 2010. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
Since Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, ending its 13-year mission, scientists have continued to comb through the rich store of data it sent back, especially during its last year, when it dove closer to Saturn’s rings than ever before.
Among the findings are a deep look at the complex ring system, which hid more structure than scientists expected, including “st ...read more
A Galapagos Finch. (Credit: Ryan M. Bolton/Shutterstock)
Nearly 200 years ago Charles Darwin voyaged to the Galapagos islands and began to formulate his theory of evolution -- largely thanks to his observations of how finches' beaks varied in shape from island to island. But now, the finches' famous beaks might be in trouble, thanks to a small, blood-sucking visitor.
An invasive insect, called Philornis downsi, is finding a home in the nests of almost every species of ground bird on the ...read more
Click on this image, acquired by NASA's Aqua satellite, to watch an animation of sea ice flowing through the Nares Strait from April 19 to May 11, 2019. This flow usually doesn't begin until June or July. (Or click on this link. Source: NASA Worldview via NSIDC)
With Arctic temperatures running well above average in May, sea ice in the region continued its long-term decline, finishing with the second lowest extent for the month.
And since then, things have gotten worse.
On June 10, A ...read more
One of the braziers recovered from the grave site. Some had residues from cannabis smoking in them. (Credit: Xinhua Wu)
More than 40 tombs dot the southeastern corner of the Pamir plateau, a desert landscape at nearly 10,000 feet elevation in far western China's high mountains. Buried with the dead is evidence that whoever put them there also conducted rituals at the site more than two millennia ago. And those ceremonies involved a certain hallucinogenic plant we know quite well today: canna ...read more
The scars of Europa’s chaos terrain also includes simple table salt, which could inform scientists about the nature of the moon’s underground ocean. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Scientists are fairly confident that Jupiter’s moon Europa has an underground ocean, even though they've never seen it.
Hidden beneath an icy crust, most of what researchers know about that ocean is based on the moon’s smooth, streaked surface. Europa lacks mountains or large craters, but it ...read more
Current food packaging often contains films that must be removed before recycling, increasing costs. (Credit: Lunatictm/Shutterstock)
Rip open a bag of chips and you’ll find a shiny, silver material staring back at you. This metallized film helps keep packaged foods like cookies and energy bars tasting fresh by preventing gases from leaking out (or in). The material is the industry standard for flexible, shelf-stable food packaging. But it’s not so great for the environment.
To ...read more
A power superflare fries an exoplanet in the star's system. (Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Player)
Astronomers have learned over the past decade that even large solar flares — powerful bursts of radiation — from our Sun are actually small potatoes compared to some of the flares we see around other stars. It’s now common to spot “superflares” hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than the Sun’s flares from stars hundreds of light-years away. Earlier this y ...read more
