NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory went into Safe Mode on October 10. An investigation is underway to find the reason why. (Credit: NASA/CXC)
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will soon be observing the cosmos once again, the space agency said Monday. A scare last week left the spacecraft in safe mode. Chandra is a space observatory that observes extreme objects that emit X-rays, like black holes. The problems with Chandra surfaced on October 10, just days after the iconic Hubble Space ...read more
This week, we discuss kidnappings & gunpoint attacks demanding cryptocurrency. We often say that cryptocurrency is unseizable. But in one sense, it’s actually more seizable than dollars in your bank account: Kidnappers’ crypto accounts, unlike bank accounts, are unfreezable and are themselves unseizable — making stolen funds completely unrecoverable.
What can we do to be safe from ransom and wrench attacks?
Bitgenstein’s Table is a narrative podcast with m ...read more
A new review paper in The Neuroscientist highlights the problem of body movements for neuroscience, from blinks to fidgeting.
Authors Patrick J Drew and colleagues of Penn State discuss how many types of movements are associated with widespread brain activation, which can contaminate brain activity recordings. This is true, they say, of both humans and experimental animals such as rodents, e.g. with their ‘whisking’ movements of the whiskers.
A particular concern is that many moveme ...read more
Neil Armstrong (left) as portrayed by Ryan Gosling in First Man (Credit: Universal)
First Man is not like other movies about the space race, and I mean that in a very good way.
I’ll admit, I was skeptical about the director of La La Land telling the story of Neil Armstrong’s historic landing on the Moon. (Would there be songs? A scowling J.K. Simmons?) It turns out to be a synergistic pairing of artist and material. First Man brushes aside the expected saga of space cowboys saddlin ...read more
This animation shows how sea surface temperatures have departed from the long-term average, from August through early October 2018. (Animation by climate.gov; data from NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Lab.)
It’s still not here yet, but El Niño sure looks like it’s coming.
In its latest forecast, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there is a 70 to 75 percent chance that El Niño will form “in the next couple of months and cont ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
