The latest NASA space probes to make the news have zoomed to the farthest reaches of the solar system, and their names – Pluto’s New Horizons, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s Rosetta and Philae – reflect the ambition and spirit of discovery behind them.
But who gets to pick those evocative names, and is there any pattern that ties them together? Read on …
What’s Way Cooler Than Naming a Kid? Naming a NASA Spacecraft
Researchers from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and the University of Colorado Boulder have combined two optical systems to get around the natural limits of optical microscopes, which usually cannot see objects smaller than the wavelengths of light. Using this method, the team found that spindle pole bodies in yeast — tiny, tube-shaped structures essential to cell division — duplicate and form some structures at different times than once thought.
(This is one of a series of press releases I am writing for Stowers. They are a bit more technical than my usual articles, but each includes a more widely accessible summary at the end. I hope you’ll check them out!)
During World War I, an American surgeon named William Baer noted that the maggot-ridden wounds he found on some soldiers looked surprisingly healthy, showing fewer signs of inflammation or infection. Baer’s observation was really a rediscovery of the medical value of maggots, a quality known to Napoleon’s Army doctors and probably used by civilizations as far back as the ancient Maya.
Today, doctors use the creepy crawlies to stem infections, speed healing and save money, particularly in cases of chronic wounds like diabetic foot ulcers. Ask your doctor if medical maggots are right for you – but first read
In the real world, disasters aren’t just a matter of scale – they’re a question of preparedness and of a society’s capacity to handle the fallout. Vaccines, rapid-response teams and early-warning systems can move the needle from calamity toward recovery, while poverty, corruption and ignorance slide it toward catastrophe. So, cue announcer: “In a world … where real disasters aren’t single events that arise from simple problems that are solvable in 93 minutes …”
Seven to 10 billion years ago, a bunch of galaxies fell in with a bad crowd at the Coma cluster — a galactic group comprising thousands of their ilk. That crash “quenched” the ill-fated galaxies. They’d never again burn with hot, young stars. But the crash should have done more than shut down the unfortunate galaxies’ stellar birth rate. It should have strewn their stars across space.
So what kept these cosmic corpses intact? Read on, if you dare (OK, so the title is a bit of a hint …).
