Astrophysicists have taken images of a large sample of exocomet belts for the first time, imaging the bands along with the tiny pebbles that orbit within. The images were published in a study in Astronomy and Astrophysics, showing bands of a variety of structures. “The images reveal a remarkable diversity in the structure of belts,” said Sebastián Marino, a study author and an astronomer at the University of Exeter, according to a press release. “Some are narrow rings […] but a larger n ...read more
Using the Body Mass Index (BMI) to diagnose obesity should go the way of blood-letting, an international panel of 58 scientists argued in the British medical journal The Lancet. Doctors should instead measure how excess body fat affects the body — a measurement called adiposity. Physicians have used BMI in part because it’s a simple calculation that compares weight relative to health.The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission argues that BMI is more simplistic than simple, because it ...read more
The fictional Magic School Bus enables its passengers to explore scientific phenomena, such as dinosaurs. Now, a non-fictional Space Bus named Pandora is ready to investigate celestial mysteries, like exoplanets that orbit small stars.The team that conceived of and built Pandora — consisting of scientists from institutions including NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Arizona — announced its completion at an American Astronomical Society press briefing in Mary ...read more
At the beginning of the 20th century, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often called “the father of modern neuroscience,” made it clear: In adults, “the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, and immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated,” he wrote. The inability of adults to produce new neurons was pretty much the central dogma of neuroscience until the 1960s. But as with a lot of fathers in that decade, a younger person challenged Ramón y Cajal’s decree.In 1962, Josef Altma ...read more
Snapshots of colorful galaxies and planets show that the beauty of our universe knows no bounds, and recent images of glowing space gas and dust captured by NASA are no exception. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has caught yet another visual spectacle, depicting layers of interstellar material illuminated by a supernova in a phenomenon known as a thermal light echo.Getting a glimpse of the brilliant scene through JWST, a team at NASA created a 3D scan of the interstellar material that disp ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine