Mission control rooms rarely celebrate crash landings. But the collision of NASA’s DART spacecraft with an asteroid was a smashing success. At about 7:15 p.m. EDT on September 26, the…
Author: ID
Here is the first direct look at Neptune’s rings in more than 30 years
Humankind is seeing Neptune’s rings in a whole new light thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. In an infrared image released September 21, Neptune and its gossamer diadems of…
Saturn’s rings and tilt might have come from one missing moon
A single, doomed moon could clear up a couple of mysteries about Saturn. This hypothetical missing moon, dubbed Chrysalis, could have helped tilt Saturn over, researchers suggest September 15 in…
Emily Jacobs wants to know how sex hormones sculpt the brain
When Emily Jacobs embarked on a career studying the brain in the early 2000s, a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, was having a moment. “Just like we…
Passing through the Milky Way’s arms may have helped form Earth’s solid ground
Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents. Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral…
Christopher Barnes is on a quest for a universal coronavirus vaccine
In January 2020, Caltech biochemist Pamela Bjorkman asked for volunteers to help work out the structures of immune proteins that attack a newly discovered coronavirus. The pathogen had emerged in…
Robin Wordsworth re-creates the atmosphere of ancient Mars
Visitors to the village of Drumnadrochit, on the western shore of Scotland’s murky Loch Ness, come to see the nearby ruins of Urquhart Castle or to chance a glimpse of…
Carlos Argüelles hunts for particles beyond the standard model
If you saw Carlos Argüelles-Delgado’s childhood bedroom — the whiteboard for working out problems, the math textbooks they asked for as birthday gifts — you’d likely not be surprised that…
The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere
The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system. “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,”…
Smruthi Karthikeyan turned to wastewater to get ahead of COVID-19
Environmental engineer Smruthi Karthikeyan had spent just a couple of days working in her new lab at the University of California, San Diego when the state instituted its first coronavirus…
