Over time, these cycles of bounty and absence come and go, and every place on Earth is crossed eventually. For human beings, with our limited lives and limited means of travel, these vagaries of celestial alignment mean the majority of people on Earth have never seen a total solar eclipse.
The Daytime StarsThe first total solar eclipse most Americans will have ever seen begins the morning of Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, two seconds before 10:16 a.m. PDT. At that moment, the dark shadow of the moon tou ...read more
Errors in the use of spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel could pose risks for science.
That’s according to a preprint posted on arXiv from Ghada AlTarawneh and Simon Thorne of Cardiff Metropolitan University.
AlTarawneh and Thorne conducted a survey of 17 researchers from the University of Newcastle neuroscience research centre, ranging from PhD students to senior researchers. None of the respondants had any formal, certified training in spreadsheet use, with most (71%) being self-taught ...read more
KELT-11b, one of the physically largest objects known, is 40 percent wider than Jupiter and has the density of styrofoam. (Credit: Walter Robinson/Lehigh University)
Last week, a team of astronomers reported the first potential discovery of an exomoon–a satellite orbiting a planet around another star. Part of what is so striking about the report is the scale of this possible planet-moon system. In this case, the “moon” appears to be about the size of Neptune; the planet it or ...read more
(Credit: Irina Kozorog/Shutterstock)
An ant without a sense of smell is an ant that’s lost.
After creating ants that had been genetically modified to lack a sense of smell, scientists watched them wander away from their colonies, steal food, refuse to mate and fail to tend to eggs — antisocial behavior that contradicts the hive-mind mentality of most ant communities.
It’s likely not because of any sociopathic tendencies on the ant’s part, but because they’ve been ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
