When President Donald Trump mentioned “other worlds” in his speech to a join Congress this week, the space community started buzzing. “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,” said Trump at the end of his speech. According to PBS NewsHour Science Correspondent Miles O’brian a manned mission could take place in 2019, … Read more
According to a recent report by Pew Research, young people are more often in favor of big government that provides a lot of social services. Pew’s research found that Americans from 18-50 are around 55% in favor of bigger government. Those over 50 and under 65 are the least in favor of bigger governments, and … Read more
About Earth’s New Little Moon After putting in its time, an asteroid called “Asteroid 2016 HO3” has now been confirmed by NASA to be a permanent resident in the Earth’s gravitational field. The asteroid was discovered earlier this year by University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, but it has been a “stable quasi-satellite” for almost … Read more
Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable BEAM module — a new lightweight activity module, part of Bigelow’s continued endeavors toward putting into use a wide range of portable expandable habitation spaces, including the living-and-working-space BA-330 (pictured above) — has been scheduled for a March NASA mission to the space station. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module will be sent to the space … Read more
A recent study of octopuses off the coast of Australia has discovered that — despite usually being considered a solitary animal — octopuses have a social life, and part of that social life involves physical displays of toughness. When octopuses meet each other in agonistic interactions, they exhibit certain types of behavior, researchers at the … Read more
An accumulation of action potentials is behind Venus Flytraps’ “decision” to keep closed and start producing digestive enzymes once their trap sensors are triggered, scientists at Universität Würzburg have found. “The carnivorous plant Dionaea muscipula, also known as Venus flytrap, can count how often it has been touched by an insect visiting its capture organ … Read more
ECOFE (European Consortium for Open Field Experimentation), a network of agricultural resources at various locations around Europe, has been proposed by a group of scientists in order to do for agricultural science what CERN has done for nuclear research. The organization would be a community of research stations across Europe — from an outpost in Sicily to a … Read more
Chimpanzees played the trust game to find out the basis of individual preference for other chimps Trust is the foundation of close relationships in the world of chimpanzees, according to anthropologists at Max Planck Institute. “Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets,” said Dr. Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute … Read more
On Monday, the XPrize Foundation announced its latest competition: the $7 Million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, which aims to map the ocean floor in high resolution, and find sources of pollution autonomously. Teams will test their technologies in two rounds at two separate undisclosed locations, mapping a 500 square kilometer area of ocean floor in … Read more
The Geminids — “the King of Meteor Showers” — will rain down around 100 to 150 multi-colored slow-moving streaks per hour this weekend, visible from anywhere, but the best views will be for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The show will peak over the night of Sunday, December 13 — between midnight and morning with the highest activity … Read more
Many of the body’s processes follow a natural daily rhythm or so-called circadian clock, so there are certain times of the day when a person is most alert, when the heart is most efficient, and when the body prefers sleep. Even bacteria have a circadian clock, and in a December 10 Cell Reports study, researchers … Read more
Pretty much everything happening in the brain would fail without astrocytes. These star-shaped glial cells are known to have a critical role in synapse creation, nervous tissue repair, and the formation of the blood-brain barrier. But while we have decades of data in mice about these nervous system support cells, how relevant those experiments are … Read more