Every year, NASA recognizes astronauts who lost their lives in the pursuit of spaceflight with an official Day of Remembrance. This year, it's celebrated Feb. 7. And NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. Another wreath-laying ceremony will also happen at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Mirror Memorial. Both ceremonies will also include observances for NASA’s lost explorers.
The three great disasters ...read more
When NASA's InSight mission reached Mars last year, it wasn’t alone. It was accompanied by two tiny satellites called CubeSats, or in this case, MarCO, for Mars Cube One. They were the first CubeSats ever to visit the Red Planet. The pair, nicknamed EVE and WALL-E, after Pixar’s fictional robots, relayed information from InSight’s descent. But their real mission was simply to show off their abilities so far from home and prove that such small missions – the total MarCO pr ...read more
Babies, many people agree, are pretty interesting. Not because of their personalities (although, to be sure, some babies are great wits), but because of everything going on in their little baby brains. The complex and intricate processing power of an adult brain is literally taking shape within a newborn’s head, as experiences and sensory input forge new neural connections. And if a baby is missing one of those senses — say, hearing — it’s reasonable to think her brain wo ...read more
Now here's a paper with an interesting title: The dark matter of the brain
Author Saak V. Ovsepian argues that "the great majority of nerve cells in the intact brain do not fire action potentials, i.e., are permanently silent." This is a remarkable claim, and it raises the question of what these silent neurons are doing. However, I didn't find myself convinced of the existence of this 'dark matter'.
Ovsepian points out that numerous studies have found that only a minority of the ne ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine