STEVE looks like an aurora, but isn’t quite one. Scientists think they’ve finally sorted out how electrons cause the strange phenomenon.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.space.com
NASA has updated a planned call for proposals for lunar landers to enable a human mission in 2024, broadening the scope to include integrated lander concepts.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: spacenews.com
Research has shown that people who are born blind or become blind early in life often have a more nuanced sense of hearing, especially when it comes to musical abilities and tracking moving objects in space (imagine crossing a busy road using sound alone). For decades scientists have wondered what changes in the brain might underlie these enhanced auditory abilities.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.washington.edu
Thompson said he’s an outlier among his military colleagues, few of whom maintain outside jobs while deployed. But in distance education, he’s far from alone. Online courses are often discussed in terms of opening opportunities for students in disparate locations. But instructors are increasingly seizing opportunities to teach from their homes or other locations convenient to their needs, if their institutions let them.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.insidehighered.com
After drawing both praise and skepticism, the team of astronomers who discovered NGC 1052-DF2 – the very first known galaxy to contain little to no dark matter – are back with stronger evidence about its bizarre nature.
Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance that typically dominates the makeup of galaxies; finding an object that’s missing dark matter is unprecedented, and came as a complete surprise.
“If there’s one object, you always have a little voice in the back of your mind saying, ‘but what if you’re wrong?’ Even though we did all the checks we could think of, we were worried that nature had thrown us for a loop and had conspired to make something look really special whereas it was really something more mundane,” said team leader Pieter van Dokkum, Sol Goldman Family Professor of Astronomy at Yale University.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: keckobservatory.org
Can you remember what you did yesterday? If not, you might want to take a lesson from Nasa poissoniana, a star-shaped flowering plant from the Peruvian Andes with an unusual skill set.
These plants can gymnastically wave around their stamens — the organs they use for fertilization — to maximize the distribution of their pollen. More surprisingly, a study published last month in Plant Signaling and Behavior suggests that individual plants can adjust the timing of these movements based on their previous experiences with pollinators. In other words, they remember the past, and try to repeat it.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nytimes.com
That Tesla Roadster? It’s actually a stealth space library launched to space aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket thanks to a tweet sent to Elon Musk.
Humanity’s first-ever permanent space library was effectively founded this week, as the three books of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy blasted into the solar system. The novels weren’t really expected to make it to space. They weren’t deliberately chosen. But they will probably be out there for millions of years, zipping around the sun, moving out past Mars 20 times faster than a bullet — and they almost certainly won’t be the last.
Another reason you might have missed the news is because the library’s curator — an entrepreneur with a fitting space name, Nova Spivack — wasn’t allowed to send out so much as a press release in advance of the launch, despite it being a triumph for his young knowledge-preserving nonprofit, the Arch Mission Foundation.
"We agreed to secrecy," Spivack tells Mashable, before thanking SpaceX, and its CEO Elon Musk, for letting him speak out post-launch about his part in what he calls "the most epic brilliant piece of performance art in world history."
Sourced through Scoop.it from: mashable.com
The universe is expanding considerably faster than it should be, NASA has confirmed. The space agency’s Hubble Space Telescope shows that it is growing about 9 per cent faster than had been expected, based on the trajectory it started with shortly after the Big Bang, according to astronomers. While such a discrepancy had already been suggested, the new measurements reduce the chance this is a mistake to just one in 100,000. Such a confirmation could require astronomers to find new physics theories to explain the universe‘s strange behavior.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.independent.co.uk
Imagine a bottle of laundry detergent that can sense when you’re running low on soap—and automatically connect to the internet to place an order for more.
University of Washington researchers are the first to make this a reality by 3-D printing plastic objects and sensors that can collect useful data and communicate with other WiFi-connected devices entirely on their own.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org
This amazing lamp was made by Sarah Turner when she was asked by the Ideal Home Show to create a large ceiling pendant from waste plastic bottles. Sarah reused 310 of the plastic bottle bases, and she used different sized plastic bottles and were over 1 meter wide! The piece was displayed in t… http://bit.ly/2Fm3Hej
