All of the galaxies we see in the distant universe are speeding away from us. This clue led Lemaitre to the idea of an expanding universe: the Big Bang. Credit: NASA/ESA/H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech)/A. Koekemoer (STScI)/R. Windhorst (Arizona State University)/Z. Levay (STScI)
In 1927, a prescient astronomer named Georges Lemaître looked at data showing how galaxies move. He noticed something peculiar – all of them appeared to be speeding away from Earth. Not only that, ...read more
The leprosy bacteria. (Credit: Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock)
For the past 25 years, Anura Rambukkana has been studying a disease that’s already been cured. He studies leprosy, a disease that was once the scourge of humanity before a course of drugs developed in the mid-20th century brought it under control.
For decades, he’s worked in a field that sees little funding and few new faces, and many of his contemporaries have moved on to higher-profile projects involving diseases that attr ...read more
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has a hazy atmosphere – seen here in the box on the left. (Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Space Science Institute, Caltech)
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere. One new research collaboration has identified a chemical mechanism that could help to explain how the moon’s haze formed.
Titan’s Haze
“Both space probes and land-based instruments have identified the chemical composition of th ...read more
I managed to get to a preview screening of First Man this week! And as someone who has been steeped in Apollo and space history for the better part of her life (I learned about the Moon landing when I was seven and have been obsessed ever since) I have some thoughts about it… Heads up: there are spoilers.
I wanted to love this movie.
The best thing about this movie is it’s gorgeous. Without question, my favourite part was the attention to detail on the hardware. The control pan ...read more
These are the caves where many of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. (Credit: Lux Moundi/Flickr)
It all started with a stray goat.
On an otherwise nondescript day in the spring of 1947, a young Bedouin boy searched for a goat that had strayed from his flock just northwest of the Dead Sea. While he was looking, Muhammed the Wolf, as the boy was known, noticed a series of small caves in the limestone cliff above him. Thinking his goat may have gone into one of those caves, and not wan ...read more
Scientists at the University of Texas Medical Center accidentally reprogrammed one type of mature neuron into another type of mature neuron, without having to revert the cells to a stem-cell state. Here, green indicates the cells that transformed. (Credit: Lei-Lei Wang/UT Southwestern)
Sometimes, the best discoveries are the ones you make by accident. Molecular biologists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center can attest to that: The team announced in a new paper in the jo ...read more
An animation of images captured by the GOES-16 weather satellite shows Hurricane Michael making landfall along the Florida Panhandle on Oct. 10, 2018. (Source: Rick Kohrs, University of Wisconsin /SSEC)
The utter devastation wrought by Hurricane Michael’s storm surge and 155-mph winds simply boggles the mind.
“It appears that the impact of the hurricane was more like a bomb than a hurricane,” National Public Radio’s Tom Gjelton reported today. “Buildings liter ...read more
Astronomers were surprised at how wimpy the explosion was from this dying star. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt)
A Strange, Dying Star
Astronomers watched the strange death of a massive star that had a surprisingly “wimpy” and fast explosion in a galaxy 920 million light-years away. According to the researchers, this unusual explosion suggests that the dying star had a secret companion that was stripping away the star’s mass, leading to the surprisingly fast supernova. The ...read more
An “anomaly” occurred as the Soyuz spacecraft carrying two astronauts launched toward the International Space Station from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday. The crew had to abort. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Launch Failure
Two astronauts made an emergency landing this morning in Kazakhstan after a Russian Soyuz rocket failed while launching them to the International Space Station. According to NASA officials, the rocket failed in its asce ...read more
