Escaping the Heliosphere
Humanity has another interstellar emissary.
After launching in 1977, NASA’s trailblazing spacecraft Voyager 2 has finally escaped the heliosphere, the Sun's protective bubble of charged particles. It follows in the path of its sibling, Voyager 1, which crossed into interstellar space in 2012.
The Sun's solar wind makes up the heliosphere, which surrounds us and all of the planets in our solar system. The boundary where the hot solar wind ...read more
OSIRIS-REx Findings
OSIRIS-REx has been busy ever since it arrived at the asteroid Bennu on December 3. The latest updates from NASA reveal that the space rock is porous, blue, and covered in massive boulders. More excitingly, they discovered evidence that Bennu's minerals interacted with water at some point in its distant past.
During a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, NASA's OSIRIS-REx team revealed the first results from their spacecraft's ...read more
Making lava to blow it up — that’s what scientists at the University of Buffalo have been up to. The first results of a long-term study led by Ingo Sonder, shown here stirring molten rock, were published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. The group has been cooking up lava in 10-gallon batches and injecting them with water to better understand the explosive reactions that sometimes occur when the two meet.
“If you think about a volcanic eruption, there ...read more
Babies to order. Andrew crotty/Shutterstock.com
When Adam Nash was still an embryo, living in a dish in the lab, scientists tested his DNA to make sure it was free of Fanconi anemia, the rare inherited blood disease from which his sister Molly suffered. They also checked his DNA for a marker that would reveal whether he shared the same tissue type. Molly needed a donor match for stem cell therapy, and her parents were determined to find one. Adam was conceived so the stem cells in his umbil ...read more
An intriguing new study uses the 2016 US Presidential election as a tool to examine the organization of human memory.
The results show that events that occur around the same time are linked in memory. Remembering one past event tends to trigger the recall of other memories from that time. This chronological clustering makes intuitive sense, but it's a theory that's been debated in psychology for a while, under the name of the temporal-contiguity effect (TCE).
According to the authors of th ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine