Why don't we ever see the far side of the moon? From Earth, it appears as if the moon doesn't rotate at all, but it does spin on its axis, just like Earth does. However, the moon is tidally locked to our planet. That means it takes just as long for the moon to rotate about its axis as it does to orbit Earth — roughly one month.
#PPOD: M51 (NGC 5194) lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbors one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team
Why were the northern and southern lights so visible over the past weekend? Let's talk about the sun's solar cycle, solar maximum, what causes the northern lights -- and even a conspiracy theory that the aurora were artificially created.
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Could play have evolutionary benefits? From sledding crows to roughhousing wolves to bees rolling balls, we examine how play shapes the animal kingdom. Plus why children need risky play. It’s “The Play’s the Thing” this week on Big Picture Science.
#PPOD: As carbon dioxide frost sublimates with the warming Martian spring, a pattern emerges of dark brown sand dunes interspersed with the remaining bright frost. Image taken by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
What I'd like to know is why did SkyNews (Australia) choose to go with the headline: "AstraZeneca withdrawn worldwide over side effects" #covid19#antivaxxer#antivax#scicomm
https://scitechdaily.com/new-space-snowman-discovery-shakes-up-solar-system-theories/
A recent study exploring the development of comets suggests that objects in deep space, such as the Kuiper Belt Object 486958 Arrokoth, might act as time capsules, preserving ancient ices from billions of years in the past. A new study is shaking up what scientists thought they knew about distant objects in the far reaches of the solar system, starting with an object called the space snowman.
#PPOD: This Hubble Space Telescope image shows boulders ejected from the asteroid Dimorphos after the DART spacecraft slammed into it in September 2022. The bright object with a tail is Dimorphos, and the tiny white dots clustered around it are boulders ranging in size from 1 to 6.7 meters (3 to 22 feet) in diameter. Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)
https://nautil.us/how-whales-could-help-us-speak-to-aliens-559443/
On Aug. 19, 2021, a humpback whale named Twain whupped back. Specifically, Twain made a series of humpback whale calls known as “whups” in response to playback recordings of whups from a boat of researchers off the coast of Alaska. The whale and the playback exchanged calls 36 times. In their 2023 published results, McGowan, Sharpe, and their coauthors are careful not to characterize their exchange with Twain as a conversation.
Why researchers are recommending that parents let kids play unsupervised in playgrounds that might resemble junkyards. Also, evolutionary benefits of play in other species from crows to wolves to bees. “The Play’s the Thing” on Big Picture Science.
#PPOD: NASA's Voyager 1 probe launched in 1977 and is now the most distant human-made object from Earth, traveling through interstellar space. Recently, NASA engineers had to figure out why the probe was suddenly sending unreadable data. After nearly six months of analysis and re-programming, they got Voyager correctly transmitting again. Truly a feat of human ingenuity. Credit: Dave Granlund
The cover of the 2007 book DINOSAUR, published by Roar, wasn't the original concept. Here is the original art, there would have been a plastic hologram eyeball (not shown here).
✅ Predicting a cardiac arrhythmia 30 minutes before its onset
✅ #Gender inequalities in times of crisis
✅ An #OpenAccess book on scientific communication
✅ A powerful new approach against #cancer
✅ #Housing accessibility during periods of inflation
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This week on #SETILive, communications specialist Beth Johnson chatted with Dr. Tom Esposito, SETI researcher and Lead of the Unistellar Cosmic Cataclysms program, about the impending nova of T Coronae Borealis and the scientific efforts to catch it!