If you feel you consistently fail at your New Year’s resolutions, you are not alone. Despite our good intentions, we’re pretty poor at changing our own behavior. We continue to smoke, eat or drink too much, and exercise too little, all of which affect our health and well-being.
Five life lessons from your immune system
Juno Saw One of Io’s Volcanoes Erupting During its Recent Flyby
Thanks to a mission extension, NASA’s Juno probe continues to orbit Jupiter, being only the second spacecraft in history to do so. Since it arrived around the gas giant on July 5th, 2016, Juno has managed to gather a great deal of information on Jupiter’s atmosphere, magnetic and gravity environment, and its interior structure.
Seasonal affective disorder: your eye colour might be why you have the ‘winter blues’
Will China’s moon landing launch a new space race?
China became the third country to land a probe on the Moon on Jan. 2. But, more importantly, it became the first to do so on the far side of the moon, often called the dark side. The ability to land on the far side of the moon is a technical achievement in its own right, one that neither Russia nor the United States has pursued.
Physicists record “lifetime” of graphene qubits
From volcanoes on Mars to scarps on Mercury – how places on other worlds get their names
The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015, successfully completed a flyby of “Ultima Thule”, an object in the Kuiper belt of bodies beyond Neptune on January 1, 2019. The name Ultima Thule, signifying a distant unknown place, is fitting but it is currently just a nickname pending formal naming. The official names of the body and of the features on its surface will eventually be allocated (this could take years) by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which celebrates its centenary in 2019.
Why does it feel good to see someone fail?
The periodic table is 150 – but it could have looked very different
The periodic table stares down from the walls of just about every chemistry lab. The credit for its creation generally goes to Dimitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist who in 1869 wrote out the known elements (of which there were 63 at the time) on cards and then arranged them in columns and rows according to their chemical and physical properties. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of this pivotal moment in science, the UN has proclaimed 2019 to be the International year of the Periodic Table.
Health Check: when should you throw away leftovers?
Why two people see the same thing but have different memories
Will wearing your coat indoors make you feel colder outside? A scientist explains
If you’ve ever had to work in a draughty office, warehouse or classroom, you’ve probably been tempted to keep your coat on inside. And you were probably also advised against it because you wouldn’t “feel the benefit” when you went outside. This might seem counter intuitive. If you’re cold already, surely you should do whatever you can to retain warmth? It turns out things aren’t that simple. To understand what’s really going on, we need to know a bit about why we feel cold in the first place.
India is Going to be Sending Three People to Space in Three Years
One of the most notable features of the modern space age is the way that new participants are entering the fray. In addition to the traditional contenders – NASA and Roscosmos – China has become a major player in space in recent decades. And in 2022, according tor recent statements, India will join the club too when it becomes the fourth nation to send a crewed mission to space.
What is ‘green’ dry cleaning? A toxics expert explains
The winter holidays are a busy time for many businesses, including retail stores, grocers, liquor stores – and dry cleaners. People pull out special-occasion clothes made of silk, satin or other fabrics that don’t launder well in soap and water. Then there are all those specialty items, from stained tablecloths to ugly holiday sweaters.
NASA’s Technosignatures Report is Out. Every Way to Find Evidence of an Intelligent Civilization
In 1961, famed astronomer Frank Drake created a formula for estimating the number of extra-terrestrial intelligences (ETIs) that could exist within our galaxy. Known as the “Drake Equation“, this formula demonstrated that even by the most conservative estimates, our galaxy was likely to host at least a few advanced civilizations at any given time. About a decade later, NASA officially kicked of its search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) program.
Why you like coffee, and I choose tea – it’s in the genes
Russian Cosmonaut says that the Hole in the ISS was Drilled From the Inside
Back in August, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) was surprised to learn that a leak was responsible for a slight loss in air pressure aboard the station. After investigating, they learned that the cause was a small hole in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that had docked with the ISS. While the hole was promptly sealed, the cause of it has remained a mystery ever since.
A brief history of black holes
Late in 2018, the gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, announced that they had detected the most distant and massive source of ripples of spacetime ever monitored: waves triggered by pairs of black holes colliding in deep space. Only since 2015 have we been able to observe these invisible astronomical bodies, which can be detected only by their gravitational attraction. The history of our hunt for these enigmatic objects traces back to the 18th century, but the crucial phase took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II.