Exploring different moons and other space objects is both fascinating and boring at the same time. For scientists, there is much to be taken from a mission to venture out into unknown worlds and seek signs of life or anything that would give us an idea of the conditions in other places found in space. But after a while, it can get boring especially if it takes a long time before you can find something interesting, which might not even show itself to you with a big bang. Now, after Cassini-Huygens, the mission that explored Saturn's Moon Titan, there is another proposed mission to explore Titan with space helicopters.
Following Darwin's theory of natural selection, we know that species of animals develop certain traits that would enable it to adapt and survive its environment in order to preserve its kind. These special traits are passed down from generation to generation and that's how different species have evolved throughout millions of years. That usually happens because of the context these animals live in and the unique elements found in their environment. But what if you find a whole diverse range of species in the same environment? How could we explain such a phenomenon? This has been what's puzzling biologists studying the cichlids at Lake Malawi. Despite living together in the same environment, they are able to branch off into new species at such a fast rate. And the answer they got is technically quite simple.
When glass caskets came out to the market, it didn't necessarily have anything new aside from the lid being made of glass. But the marketers of that time wanted to take the opportunity of highlighting certain design elements of the glass casket and blowing it out of proportion, claiming that it would preserve the flesh and bone of your deceased such that it won't rot or decay. These were incredibly absurd claims and it's ridiculous to think that covering a corpse in a tightly sealed container would prevent its decay. Still though, they sold the idea and some shares of these glass casket companies to people, which forced states like Louisiana to pass laws protecting consumers from fraud.
(Image credit: Fred Hunter/Corning Museum of Glass)
Learning the history of one's nation can take more than one perspective, especially if it had been in contact with other nations. There is the view from the inside, which is how the people of the nation tell their own history. And there is the view from the outside, how other people describe that nation and tell that nation's story from their perspective. And such is the case for America. In the Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi, we see illustrations of how the Japanese viewed the United States' history and told their story by incorporating some elements from their own culture.
"Here is George Washington (with bow and arrow) pictured alongside the Goddess of America," writes historian of Japan Nick Kapur in a Twitter thread featuring selections from the book. History does record Washington having practiced archery in his youth, among other popular sports of the day, and the image of the Goddess of America does look like a faintly Japanese version of Columbia, the historical female personification of the United States.
Global warming is relentless. Our oceans are getting warmer and warmer, and there are no signs of it cooling down any time soon, unless of course several volcanoes on the Earth simultaneously erupt. Will the Earth end up with vast lands of desert and dry ground where the oceans once were?
But even if humans keep spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, could the oceans ever get so hot that they begin to boil? Thankfully, humanity's current practices could likely never heat up the world enough to make that happen.
"Even if we burned all known fossil-fuel reserves, we wouldn't get nearly that warm," Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a temperature data analysis nonprofit organization, told Live Science. "Though, it's worth mentioning that there are plenty of bad climate impacts that happen a long, long way before the surface is literally hot enough to boil water."
Check the calendar on your computer or your phone. Until what year does it allow you to reach? It might not go on for 100 years, it might not even reach 2100. And that's given since we probably won't live for that long. How about this: try going as far back as you can. You probably won't be able to go beyond 1900. What if there were a calendar that can track all days, months, and years from the year 1 to 4000? You might think such a thing is too tedious to build or even unnecessary. Who would want to know on which day a certain date a thousand years from now fall? Well, the astronomer and mathematician Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana built the Perpetual Calendar that does exactly that. It can tell you on which day of the week, say, January 1, 3000 falls.
The device, which resides in the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants, operates via a simple wooden crank under the adorned golden frame, a crank that hides a stunningly accurate universal mechanical calculator spanning the years 1 to 4,000. Want to know the day of the week that the Western Roman Empire fell to the barbarians, on September 4, 476? The calendar will tell you that it was a Monday. Or maybe the phase of the moon on the day you were born? Or the date of Easter a thousand years from now (April 18, 3019)? All of this information can be accessed by a pre-internet machine made of fragile wood and paper, and communicated through 46,000 little numbers carefully arranged around nine cylinders. Each of these is linked to a central one—the only adjustable part of the device—where the user can input the year. That cylinder synchronously regulates all the others through gears and chains.
Now, new research shows that the same alteration introduced into the girls’ DNA, deletion of a gene called CCR5, not only makes mice smarter but also improves human brain recovery after stroke, and could be linked to greater success in school.
“The answer is likely yes, it did affect their brains,” says Alcino J. Silva, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose lab uncovered a major new role for the CCR5 gene in memory and the brain’s ability to form new connections.
“The simplest interpretation is that those mutations will probably have an impact on cognitive function in the twins,” says Silva. He says the exact effect on the girls’ cognition is impossible to predict, and “that is why it should not be done.”
It is unsure whether this process will actually make them smarter as they grow and develop or if there would be some other side effect as a result of the procedure. Still, the ethical issue stands. We don't know whether manipulating the genes of embryos before implanting them would be beneficial or detrimental to the babies as they grow or if there would be unforeseen circumstances that would develop such as genetic malfunction or disorders, which is why the practice is banned. We can only wait and see what would happen to the CRISPR babies.
It has been almost 50 years since NASA put a man on the moon, the last time being Apollo 17 which launched on 7 December 1972. Subsequent missions of the Apollo program were cancelled due to various reasons. But recently, NASA has declared that they want to bring people back to the moon.
The space agency has declared that it wants to send humans back to the Moon, to live and work there and explore whether its water resources might be tapped. Moreover, it will support the efforts of (mostly) fledgling companies who aspire to deliver small spacecraft like the Israeli lander to the surface of the Moon by buying services from them for the agency's own scientific experiments. Earlier on Thursday, in fact, the agency announced the first dozen experiments it would like to send to the Moon this year.
The widely accepted theory why dinosaurs went extinct around 66 million years ago was that a huge meteor crashed onto the earth causing a massive explosion that wiped out most of the living creatures on the planet. However, there is a theory based on data collected by researchers saying that apart from the meteor hitting the earth, volcanic eruptions might have also contributed to the mass extinction event. Whether they simultaneously occurred or the meteor impact caused the eruptions is still unclear.
The research sheds light on huge lava flows that have erupted periodically over Earth's history, and how they have affected the atmosphere and altered the course of life on the planet.
In the study, University of California, Berkeley, scientists report the most precise and accurate dates yet for the intense volcanic eruptions in India that coincided with the worldwide extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, the so-called K-Pg boundary. The million-year sequence of eruptions spewed lava flows for distances of at least 500 kilometers across the Indian continent, creating the so-called Deccan Traps flood basalts that in some places are nearly 2 kilometers thick.
Before Apollo 11 launched and landed on the moon, the scientists at NASA needed to map out the surface of the moon so that they would know where would be the best spot to land the spacecraft. In order to do that they launched five satellites to orbit the moon and used the photographs taken by the orbiters to calculate the best spot for the landing of Apollo 11.
The Lunar Orbiters weren’t the first photo-focused spacecraft aimed at the moon, but they were unique because of the equipment they were carrying.
“They basically borrowed spy cameras from the Defense Department, from their satellite program,” says David Williams, the acting head of the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive. At the time, the U.S. Department of Defense was using similar cameras in the CORONA program, known to the public as Discoverer, to take satellite photos of the Soviet Union.
Each Lunar Orbiter had two cameras, one with a high-resolution lens and one with medium resolution. Rather than standard 35-millimeter film, the satellites used 70-millimeter, the same size that’s used today to make IMAX movies.
What goes on in the minds of bees? Well, we might very well be able to find out with this new method that researchers from the Free University of Berlin have devised. They used electrode implants on the bees' mushroom body, a region of the brain in the front antennal lobe, in order to record neurological changes as they go through a virtual reality environment.
The development of an effective VR setup for honeybees “was a big achievement,” says Giurfa. He says that the new study, which he did not participate in, shows how this technology can be paired with neural recording equipment, as has been done for fruit flies and mice, to gain more insight into mechanisms for learning and memory.
When we learn to associate certain cues and stimuli to a particular result or event, and an additional stimulus is introduced in conjunction with it, there is a phenomenon wherein our minds will not associate the event with the added stimulus. This is called "memory blocking" and it was thought that this was due to the problem of forming memories. But researchers from the University of Toronto have looked into the mind of the C. elegans worm in order to figure out how this phenomenon occurs. And they found out that it has nothing to do with forming memories and instead, it has something to do with memory recall.
Kamin blocking is thought to be a key way in which humans learn by focusing on novelty. It led to a well-established idea that to learn about an experience, it has to carry with it an element of surprise. Problems with blocking are pronounced in people with schizophrenia, which is thought to decrease selectivity in attention.
The process, however, has been difficult to study in granular detail in the mammalian brain due to its complexity and lack of molecular tools.
"Being able to fully describe the molecular changes that are going on in memory is enormously appealing, but human memory is too ephemeral and nebulous to pin it down," says Merritt. "But by studying it in worms, we are really making a lot of headway in figuring out exactly what is going on when memories are formed and retrieved in a molecule by molecule fashion."
Nothing can be more confusing than a man claiming that he killed his sister-in-law and her fiancee because of his religious beliefs. In particular, the principles laid out by the Church of Scientology. But right now, that seems to be the only defense that is keeping him hanging on by a thread. About seven years ago, Kenneth Wayne Thompson went out of his house, told his wife and kids that he would go take care of his recently deceased parents' estate in Memphis, and instead, drove all the way to Prescott Valley, Arizona to murder his wife's sister and her fiancee. And his reason: because his nephew was undergoing psychiatric treatment, to which the Church of Scientology, as Thompson's lawyers claim, is opposed.
(Image credit: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast)
It's not necessarily perfect, but when you look at this three-dimensional shape pieced together with paper and tape, it feels oddly amusing. The way the shapes fit together in a seemingly seamless fashion makes this polygonal creation look almost unreal. And theoretically, it should be impossible to make something like this, let alone for it to exist in the realm of mathematics. But what seems impossible in theory can sometimes be made possible as the rules are bent in the practical, real world.
It is a new example of an unexpected class of mathematical objects that the American mathematician Norman Johnson stumbled upon in the 1960s. Johnson was working to complete a project started over 2,000 years earlier by Plato: to catalog geometric perfection. Among the infinite variety of three-dimensional shapes, just five can be constructed out of identical regular polygons: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. If you mix and match polygons, you can form another 13 shapes from regular polygons that meet the same way at every vertex—the Archimedean solids—as well as prisms (two identical polygons connected by squares) and “anti-prisms” (two identical polygons connected by equilateral triangles).
For humans, it is recommended to have at least eight hours of sleep each day. There are various proponents for sleep and its importance in our daily lives leading to increased productivity, better cognitive functioning, and an overall regulatory process that helps our body regenerate the energy it spent throughout the day. But for other animals, sleep may not be necessary at all.
Sleep is potentially costly to many animals, making them vulnerable to predators and stealing time from resource-gathering or mating opportunities. For that reason, scientists have long assumed it evolved to give animals some vital, evolutionary advantage—perhaps as a means of conserving energy or of giving the brain time to organize memories. In any case, no truly sleepless animal has ever been found in the wild.
In the new study, researchers were observing Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies in the lab when they noticed a very large distribution in sleep duration. Most slept somewhere between 300 minutes and 600 minutes per day, but about 6% of females slept for less than 72 minutes per day, and three particularly restless individuals slept for only 15, 14, or 4 minutes per day, respectively.
