Carol Howard, 69, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease six years ago. (Credit: Joel Shurkin)
(Inside Science) — The second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony begins with a minor-key rhythm in the cellos. It sounds like a background rhythm, which it becomes when the violins introduce a second, soaring and entirely different melody. One half the Baltimore Symphony is on stage playing one thing; the other half, another. Next to me, my wife, Carol, le ...read more
Brain organoids in a petri dish. (Credit: UCSD)
Alysson Muotri and his team have been toiling away in the lab for the last year and a half or so, obsessing over bland-looking, pea-sized lumps of cells. Despite their unassuming appearance, lumps like these have taken neuroscience by storm. They’re lab-grown “brains.” Scientists call them brain organoids, and they offer rudimentary 3-D models of the brain’s cortex — the outer layer where complex functions like memor ...read more
Astronomers say the galactic center is home to a black hole (illustration shown) with as much mass as 4 million suns. Its entourage likely includes clusters of stars — many of them orbiting each other in two- or three-star systems — as well as smaller black holes. (Credit: NASA/Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital)
In April, the European Space Agency released the second massive trove of data from Gaia, a spinning, scanning satellite that for nearly five years has been spying on a billion s ...read more
OSIRIS-REx images asteroid Bennu from just 200 miles (330 kilometers) away. (Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)
At long last, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft has delivered an up close and personal view of asteroid Bennu.
This composite image was created from eight shots taken by the craft’s PolyCam camera. Transmitting data back to Earth, researchers used a super-resolution algorithm ...read more
A mosaic image of Mars created from over 100 images taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s. (Credit: Viking Project, USGS, NASA)
For years, astronomers have wondered where the Red Planet got its organic carbon compounds, which are thought to be necessary for life as we know it on Earth. That organic carbon often comes from biological sources on Earth, but researchers have been working to figure out how they’re created on Mars. Now, a new analysis of Martian meteorites indicates that the o ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
