Even just 30 days in space can significantly reduce our immune system’s ability to fight infection, suggests a new analysis of mice that spent a month aboard an orbiting spacecraft.
The research, which was published December 6 in the journal Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, is a recent analysis of data from the Bion-M1 mission, which was a collaborative project carried out by NASA and the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems in 2013.
Space Mice
As ...read more
Planet Hunting
In a vast cloud of dust and gas 450 light-years from Earth in the Taurus constellation, scientists have found evidence of a treasure trove of super-Earths and Neptune-sized planets.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of researchers conducted a study of young stars in a gaseous, star-forming region of Taurus. The team observed and imaged 32 stars in the region that are surrounded by protoplanetary disks — rotating disks of dust and gas that surr ...read more
In a small windowless room on a sweltering summer’s day, I find myself face-to-face with an entomological rock star. I’m at the University of Lincoln in eastern England, inside an insectary, a room lined with tanks and jars containing plastic plants and dozing insects. Before I know it, I’m being introduced to a vibrant-green katydid from Colombia.
“Meet Copiphora gorgonensis,” says Fernando Montealegre-Z, discoverer of this six-legged celebrity. The name’s f ...read more
As a gift to the citizen science community, this holiday season, SciStarter created a beautiful citizen science calendar!
This calendar was developed with the help of a lot of people. The Citizen Science Association Listservand Jill Nugent compiled an awesome collection of events, and then Erica Chenoweth took this list and created a Google Calendar with even more citizen science prompts.
You can add to the Google Calendar whenever you wish, to ...read more
Detecting Dark Matter
For years, researchers have been hunting for dark matter, which is thought to make up about 27 percent of the entire known universe. Now, an innovative team of scientists says they may have figured out a new way to detect the elusive substance using an international network of atomic clocks.
In 1998, with observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists found that the universe was expanding faster and faster, which contradicted the expectation that gravity wou ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine