A new study of stars in the Milky Way reveals evidence of a cosmic near miss collision with a smaller galaxy sometime in the last billion years. (Credit: ESA)
Our Milky Way galaxy holds hundreds of billions of stars. Many of those suns were formed locally from clouds of gas — at the rate of handful every year —over billions of years. But our home galaxy gets stars another way, too. It steals them.
The Milky Way has cannibalized smaller galaxies throughout the eons, adding them to o ...read more
An animation of before and after images acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite shows flooding in the wake of Florence across southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina. (Source: Modified from CIMSS Satellite Blog)
You’ve probably seen imagery shot in the Carolinas showing the devastating flooding that Hurricane Florence left its wake. Now, check out what that flooding looks like from space — in the before-and-after animation above of false-color satelli ...read more
Skywatchers have been enjoyed views of the Crab Nebula for nearly 1,000 years. (Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU))
In late spring in the year 1054, a strange light appeared in the sky in what we would now call the constellation Taurus the Bull. It was a new star, where no star had been before. It grew quickly brighter, until by July it outshone everything except the moon. Over the next two years it faded away, becoming a star of normal brightness and eventually disappearing again ent ...read more
Russia’s Zond 5 spacecraft carried two steppe tortoises on the first successful flight around the moon. The tortoises lived through their splash down in the Indian Ocean and were returned safely to Moscow, proving life could survive the trip around the moon. (Credit: S.P. Korolev RSC Energia/Courtesy of NASA)
Anders. Borman. Lovell. The names of the first three humans to journey around the moon will echo throughout eternity. But these brave Apollo 8 astronauts were actually not the first ...read more
(Credit: Studiostoks/Shutterstock)
It’s no secret that stress is bad for your health.
Everybody knows that “life stress events” — things like loss of a job, death of a loved one and getting divorced (or married) raise the risk of getting sick.
All sorts of other life events also generate stress, with possible negative health effects ranging from catching a cold to major depression to a fatal heart attack.
Of course, knowing about the link between stress and sickness ju ...read more
An artist’s illustration shows the Epsilon Indi system, with two brown dwarfs at the forefront and a main sequence star off in the distance. (Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa and Sergio Dieterich, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science)
The universe is filled with billions of massive celestials objects, from stars to planets to comets to asteroids. But what happens when lines start to blur between these classifications, and we just can’t place an object in any major catego ...read more
Irritable bowel Disease is a painful syndrome that affects the intestines. Scientists say they’ve discovered a major driver of the disease. (Credit: RomarioIen/shutterstock)
Researchers have identified a prime culprit behind inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, an incurable disorder that causes abdominal pain, diarrhea and weight loss from malnutrition. The discovery also reveals a pathway to treatment, scientists report today in the journal Cell Reports.
“We were able to block ...read more
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
