Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is coming in hot and heavy at this point, with various data streams from multiple instruments being reported in various papers. One exciting one will be released shortly in the Astrophysical Journal from researchers at the University of Kansas (KU), where researchers collected mid-infrared images of a part of the sky that holds galaxies from the time of the "cosmic noon" about 10 billion years ago. Their paper describes this survey and invites citizen scientists to help catalogue and classify some of their findings.
At some early point in Earth's history, a collection of increasingly complex chemicals performed a new trick. They transformed themselves somehow into an energy-producing and self-replicating cell. The timing of this critical moment in Earth's history is hidden behind the haze of billions of years.
It’s a cosmic shame, that we tend to only see flat-looking, 2-dimensional views of deep-sky objects. And while we can’t just zoom out past the Andromeda galaxy for another perspective, or see the Crab Nebula from another vantage point in space, we can use existing data to simulate objects in 3D. A recent collection released by Marshall Space Flight Center’s Chandra X-ray Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows us familiar objects in a new way.
One of the greatest innovations benefiting public health was regulation. In the pre-FDA “patent medicine” days, there were countless products on the market that ranged from useless to directly harmful. This was a time when you could sell radioactive tonics, cocaine-laced elixirs, and products containing poisons, like turpentine. The sellers of these products made many unsupported claims and preyed disproportionately on the […]
The post Self-Treating with Serious Drugs on the Rise first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.When China's DRO-A and B satellites were launched, their rocket failed to deliver them to their planned orbit. Even worse, the satellites were spinning out of control, unable to properly charge their solar panels. Engineers realized that there was still a way to put them on course again. They executed a series of gravitational slingshots over 123 days, using the Sun, Earth, and the Moon to raise the spacecraft's orbits and put them into their proper trajectory.
The weather gets a little wild and weird on Jupiter. How wild? Spacecraft instruments have measured strong winds, tracked fierce lightning, and found huge methane plume storms rising from deep beneath the clouds. How weird? Think: mushballs raining down like hailstones. They're made of ammonia and water encased in a water ice shell. According to planetary scientists, these mushballs plunge through the Jovian atmosphere. What's more, they probably form on the other gas and ice giants, too.
The evidence is building that the surface of Mars was warm and wet for its early history. But what form did this water take? In a new study, geologists propose that Mars has very similar features to places like Utah on Earth, where precipitation from snow or rain formed the patterns of valleys and headwaters that have been mapped from space. Some of these features would require meters deep of flowing water to deposit large boulders.
Let’s turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don’t have to do any work – we just have to be in the right spot.
Studying the Sun is becoming increasingly important as more and more of our infrastructure moves off the surface and into the realm where coronal mass ejections and the solar wind can begin to affect them. Scientists recognize this problem and have started devoting more and more resources to studying the Sun, specifically the "space weather" that might affect us. Recently, one of the newest members of the group of satellites focused on studying the Sun hit a milestone when the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission took on its first light.