Sugar. A variant on the sweetest ingredient in many a sumptuous holiday feast, glycolaldehyde has now been found in a star-forming region of space far from the galactic center called G31.41+0.31, about 26,00 light years away from Earth. Directly linked to the origin of life, glycolaldehyde is an advantageous find for researchers seeking out habitable
Physics
Wild Turkey / Image Credit: Andrea Westmoreland via Flickr There are 60-foot high balloons floating above packed city blocks, cranberries on the stove, inside-the-turkey stuffing, mashed potatoes, outside-the-turkey stuffing, football, abominably huge turkeys, and one lucky bird. The best part of Thanksgiving dinner? Leftover Thanksgiving dinner. But those leftovers take hard work– that hot, perfect,
Who hasn’t wished the doctor would prescribe a week of vacation or a trip to Walt Disney World to cure an ailment? For patients with kidney stones, that might be just around the corner. According to research published in 2016 in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, a trip to your local amusement park might
By: Hannah Pell Two years ago on November 16th, 2018, representatives from more than 60 member nations of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (International Bureau of Weights and Measures) convened in Versailles, France to make a very important decision. Representatives in attendance to the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) unanimously
Just outside the town of Oracle, Arizona, nestled between the seemingly endless plains of the Sonaran desert and the cactus-pocked foothills of Mount Lemmon, stands an enormous glass ziggurat: Biosphere 2. Built in the late ‘80s at the behest of an oil tycoon, the structure was intended to be a small-scale model of a self-contained
Artistic representation of OSIRIS-REx over the asteroid Bennu. NASA/GODDARD/University of Arizona. In 2016, the OSIRIS-REx probe left Earth but unlike most other probes on their journey out to space, OSIRIS-REx does intend to return home. If all goes well, OSIRIS-REx will return to its home in 2023 carrying a precious sample. As of 2018, OSIRIS-REx
By: Hannah Pell It’s nationwide election time yet again. As of October 30th, more than 85 million Americans have already cast their ballot, a remarkable number considering total voter turnout for the 2016 election was 138 million. By the time you’re reading this, we may or may not yet know the winners, especially given the
By Allison Kubo Hutchsion Although humans first witnessed nuclear reactors in 1942 with the development of the Chicago-Pile by Enrico Fermi, natural fission reactors existed billions of years ago. Fission is the process of breaking apart atoms of heavy elements such as uranium. Energy is released during fission in the form of heat and can
NASA image of a dust storm from 1998. Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE – NASA Visible Earth, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=402743 By Jeremiah O’Mahony The Canary Islands spent a few days of March 2018 shrouded in Saharan dust. Calimas, two-to three-day-long gusts of sand and warm wind named for the haze they
By: Hannah Pell On September 22, 2020, NASA and the U. S. Space Command announced that they were tracking an unidentified piece of space debris that appeared to be hurtling toward the International Space Station (ISS). It was predicted to pass by within only a few kilometers, dangerously too close to chance, at 5:21 p.m.
By: Hannah Pell On 23 January 2020, the Doomsday Clock was calibrated to 100 seconds before midnight — the closest it has even been — by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization in charge of the clock. Because the Doomsday Clock is set no sooner than annually, this decision was made even before
Originally written for https://www.tamiawilliams.com/blog - TamiaWilliams Image: 5 Year Old Drip (Bobo hair ties, Clear skin & Sunday’s best), 2001 This is my mom’s favorite picture of me as a child. On the back, it’s dated Oct/Nov 2001 – Tamia – 5yrs old. I have no recollection of this day, when the picture was taken
What makes skin so tough? Originally published: May 4 2015 – 11:45am, Inside Science News Service By: Lisa Marie Potter, Contributor (Inside Science) — Skin has to be flexible enough to jump, crawl, and kick with us. It also has to be resilient enough to withstand our falls, scrapes, and cuts. Scientists have marveled at skin’s strength for
By Allison Kubo Hutchison Comparison of Earth, the Moon, and Ceres. Image by Gregory Revera NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA. Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt. It represents the history of our solar system as a protoplanet, a planetary embryo which formed 4.56 billion years ago. Earth itself is made of the agglomeration of several planetary
By: Hannah Pell On September 20th, 2019 — one year ago today as I write this — the infamous Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant was permanently shut down. TMI Unit-2 has been shuttered since the partial meltdown in 1979, an event described as the “most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant
According to folklore, earwigs like to crawl through the ears of sleeping humans, burrow into their brains, and lay eggs. Perhaps for this reason, or maybe because of their large rear-end pinchers, these insects tend to fall in the “creepy” category. Don’t be fooled through, earwigs are more sophisticated than they look: they’re record-holders in
At sports venues designed to maximize crowd atmosphere, beware of hearing loss. Originally published: Apr 14 2014 – 2:45pm, Inside Science News Service By: Brian Owens, ISNS Contributor (ISNS) — The roar of the crowd is a major part of the excitement of attending a sporting event. A noisy, engaged crowd makes for a better experience for fans,
Public engagement event at a local high school with the Women and Minorities in the Physical Sciences group in graduate school By: Brean Prefontaine We all know what is about to happen when someone asks, “What do/did you study?” As soon as you utter the word “physics” you have to brace for the inevitable “oh,
By: Hannah Pell “Assume the cow is a perfect sphere.” Any of us who have taken a physics class or two has probably met the Spherical Cow at some point (or a version of it). How can I calculate the volume of an irregular, misshapen 3-D object like a cow? Well, I’ll smooth out the
By Hannah Pell Alice and Bob are recurring characters in science. They can usually be found chatting over the phone or playing games of chance with each other, such as poker or flipping coins. But no matter Alice’s and Bob’s thought-experiment scenario, there is always some sort of a communication problem at the core of
By: Hannah Pell The Starting Line As I write this, twenty cars are sitting at the starting line of the Formula One (F1) 70th Anniversary Grand Prix at Silverstone based in the UK. The drivers have just finished their formation lap, and the $10 million engines are idling at roughly 5000 rpm (for comparison, the
New research by the University of Oregon and partners at the United States Geologic Survey reveals the landscape dotted with 2835 volcanoes from Northern California to the border of Washington. This area is a center for volcanic activity due to the subducting Juan De Fuca plate which produces melt that rises up through the crust
Neutrino events from a supernova were first captured in 1987, when a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud exploded, seen here in a wide-field image from Hubble. Credits: NASA/STScI By Korena Di Roma Howley For a particle with no charge and nearly no mass, the neutrino gets a lot of scientific press—and it’s no wonder
By Allison Kubo Graphene is a comprised of a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. This sheet can be wrapped into fullerenes, rolled into nanotubes, or stacked to form graphite the same thing uses ing pencils. All of these are made of carbon: diamonds, graphite, graphene are all different arrangements of
Dorothea Klumpke. Photo: Wikipedia By Korena Di Roma Howley Just before 1 a.m. on November 16, 1899, an American astronomer named Dorothea Klumpke began her voyage over Paris and northwest France in a balloon called La Centaure, from which she hoped to witness the Leonid meteor shower as nearly no one had done before. Handpicked
By Jonna Jasmin Güven I was pumping out the air from a vacuum tupperware box that had a marshmallow inside. The kids’ smiles were widening as the marshmallow was expanding inside the box. I asked one of the dads to try and remove the lid from the box. It wouldn’t come off as the vacuum
This x-ray map is much more than a beautiful desktop background. By Allison Kubo On June 19, the eRosita instrument aboard the Russian-German “Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma” (SRG) mission finished cataloging more that 1 million high energy x-ray sources more than had ever been recorded before this study. The image above shows our sky illuminated in x-rays, the
At 80 to 100 kilometers in circumference, the future supercollider, located near the LHC at the Swiss-French border, would dwarf its record-holding counterpart. Credit: CERN By Korena Di Roma Howley In a 100-kilometer leap for particle physics, the governing body of European lab CERN recently approved taking additional steps toward plans to build a $24-billion
By: Hannah Pell “Every time you turn around it seems that someone has published a new physics journal,” begins a Special Report in the August 1970 issue Physics Today. The report goes on to list more than 30 new physics and astronomy journals that started in 1968 and had been mentioned in the magazine within
Since the discovery of the Higgs Boson (or, more infamously, the “God Particle”) in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) based at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), particle physicists have sought to expand their ability to probe Nature’s deepest secrets. Although the Higgs was the last missing piece of the Standard Model
By Leah Poffenberger Artist’s representation of Pōniuāʻena. IMAGE CREDIT: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld Looking up at the night sky stars is a bit like going to a history museum: The light we see is giving us a glimpse into the past. When light is emitted from a star, it has to travel across the galaxy
By: Hannah Pell “The American Physical Society (APS) has a vision of the future of physics publishing, in 2020 or so.” So begins a 1993 Science article titled “Publication by Electronic Mail Takes Physics by Storm.” Burton Richter, then-president of APS and former head of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), elaborated: “Any physicist, any
Ximena Cid (second from left) stands with students in front of a mural on the CSUDH campus. Credit: CSUDH By Korena Di Roma Howley As a young girl growing up in Sacramento, California, Ximena Cid would sit on her roof and stare at the night sky. “I always had a love of the stars, of
The Case for Fahrenheit vs Celsius in terms of human comfort. By Allison Kubo Hutchison Scientists have to know how to speak the languages of many units. Improper unit conversions have caused much heartache and suffering in the past, including the loss of a $125 million dollar Mars orbiter. In general, peer-reviewed science journals only
By: Hannah Pell Graphic from shutdownSTEM.com. Recently I started rereading When Physics Became King by Iwan Rhys Morus, a historian of science at Aberystwyth University in Wales. Published in 2005, Morus traces the development of physics through the nineteenth century, as the field gradually evolved from its roots in natural philosophy and mathematics to later
By Leah Poffenberger Everyday life is full of choices: Coffee or tea? Apples or oranges? iPhone or Android? We also have to tackle more serious questions, like who to vote for in an election. Especially for the important choices in our lives, these decisions don’t happen in a vacuum: We’re usually getting a lot of
3 Groundbreaking Experiments Happening Aboard the ISS Right Now https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/christina-koch-activates-the-new-biofabrication-facility NASA astronaut Christina Koch activates the BioFabrication Facility aboard the ISS in August 2019. Credit: NASA Astronauts often leave Earth with plenty of fanfare, but spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS) also routinely carry components for on-orbit experimentation, known as payloads. These systems
One night in late April, my husband happened to look out the window and noticed, passing over our valley in southwest Montana, a string of around 30 mysterious lights—too fast to be aircraft and apparently too numerous to be satellites. The next day, a string of emails lit up a local listserv. People who’d observed
Imagine a world where everyone is right-handed. The world may not look different, but eventually, the question might arise: Why is no one left-handed? In the world of the molecules that make up the bodies of living things like DNA and RNA, this is a real question—and astrophysics researchers think they might have an answer.
The essence of the perfect slice of sourdough bread is in the air right now. It is even on your hands. The heart of the sourdough is the starter, a fermented culture of flour and water. The sour flavor of the dough comes from lactic acid bacteria (LAB) who live in relative harmony and competition
Combatting the COVID-19 pandemic has become an international challenge and charge. It has highlighted the positive consequences of science operating on a global scale. It has shown how answers can be found quickly when scientists share results at unprecedented speed and research becomes increasingly open-access. It has shown that we must rely on scientists from
What happens when you focus one of the world’s most powerful lasers on a spot so tiny it can be hidden by a human hair? Using the J-KAREN-P laser at the Kansai Photon Science Institute (KPSI) in Japan, a team led by researchers from the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST)
We’ve all wished for weightlessness at some point in our lives—that fantastical quality that powers the magic of flying broomsticks and fuels our fascination with space travel. Although we’re a long way from floating down the street, physicists have developed ways to mitigate the effect of gravity, from carefully aligning sound waves to mimicking free
The electromagnetic spectrum, an assortment of energy wiggling throughout space and time, is overwhelmingly underappreciated in our lives. There is no combination of existence that could happen without it. To celebrate the role that light plays in our lives, our ecosystem, and the operation of the universe, UNESCO declared March 16th as the International Day
UUltrasound is a powerful tool for looking inside the body. The scans see through layers of tissue to reveal pumping hearts, developing fetuses, troublesome blood clots, and injured muscles. They are relatively low-cost, portable, and have few side effects. Patients aren’t exposed to ionizing radiation or confined in a small space. They are, however, slathered
If you’re on the receiving end of a snapping shrimp’s attack, prepare to be stunned. Also known as pistol shrimp, these little crustaceans shoot lethal rounds at predators and prey at highway speeds—a direct hit can be outright fatal or shock the recipient into submission. It’s not just the force of the attack that’s stunning
One of the most captivating aspects of the summer Olympics is watching the world’s best athletes push their bodies to the edge of what is humanly possible. In 2016, the world watched in awe as Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt won his third consecutive Olympic gold in each of three distances—the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay.
The novel coronavirus outbreak has quickly become the largest pandemic in recent history, but it’s not unprecedented. The outbreak of the so-called “Spanish Flu”, an avian influenza virus, spread worldwide, infecting one-third of the population. While scientists are still learning how the coronavirus operates, we have lots of tools at our disposal to fight it.