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experiment

SPACE: MOXIE Will Soon Make Oxygen – On Mars

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MOXIE - Nasa

Having safely landed on Mars on Feb. 18, NASA’s newest rover, Perseverance, is just beginning its scientific exploration of the Red Planet. But sometime in the next few weeks, the car-size robot will also help pave the way for future humans to travel to our neighboring world with a small instrument known as the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE). MOXIE, which will soon be pulling precious oxygen out of Mars’ poisonous atmosphere, is gold-colored and about the size of a bread box. It sits tucked away inside Perseverance’s chassis, where it will conduct the first demonstration on another … Read more

Growing Black Holes In a Lab? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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black hole - pixabay

In 1974, Stephen Hawking theorized that the universe’s darkest gravitational behemoths, black holes, were not the pitch-black star swallowers astronomers imagined, but they spontaneously emitted light — a phenomenon now dubbed Hawking radiation. The problem is, no astronomer has ever observed Hawking’s mysterious radiation, and because it is predicted to be very dim, they may never will. Which is why scientists today are creating their own black holes. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology did just that. They created a black hole analog out of a few thousand atoms. They were trying to confirm two of Hawking’s most important … Read more

STUDY: Blind People Can “See” Letters Drawn on their Brains With Electricity

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brain - pixabay

Scientists sent patterns of electricity coursing across people’s brains, coaxing their brains to see letters that weren’t there. The experiment worked in both sighted people and blind participants who had lost their sight in adulthood, according to the study, published today (May 14) in the journal Cell. Although this technology remains in its early days, implanted devices could potentially be used in the future to stimulate the brain and somewhat restore people’s vision. Known as visual prosthetics, the implants were placed on the visual cortex and then stimulated in a pattern to “trace” out shapes that the participants could then … Read more

Thought Experiment: What If Earth Were Supersized?

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Super Earth - Yay Images

For nearly four years, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft whisked through space, surveying our corner of the galaxy. It monitored more than 150,000 stars, looking for planets about the size of Earth that belonged to other solar systems. The mission didn’t disappoint; Kepler found countless examples of a type of planet known as a super-Earth. These faraway planets might remind you of home — they’re rocky, smaller than gas giants, located near their star and sport a relatively thin atmosphere. But they’re way larger than the blue marble: These super-Earths are a honking two to 10 times bigger in mass than our … Read more

SCIENCE: New Quantum Experiment Puts 2000 Atoms in Two Places at Once

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atoms

Giant molecules can be in two places at once, thanks to quantum physics. That’s something that scientists have long known is theoretically true based on a few facts: Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave — even large particles, even bacteria, even human beings, even planets and stars. And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once. Physicists call this phenomenon “quantum superposition,” and for decades, they have demonstrated it using small particles. But in recent years, physicists have scaled up their … Read more

SCIENCE: We Can Now Rewrite Rat Memories

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rat - pixabay

When Ivan Pavlov’s dog heard the ding of a bell, the pup started salivating in anticipation of his dinner. When professor Mary Torregrossa’s rats heard a similar tone, they craved cocaine. At least, some of them did — before Torregrossa and her colleagues rewrote their memories. Torregrossa studies the psychology of drug addiction and relapses at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (where she is also an associate professor of psychiatry). In a new study published Jan. 22 in the journal Cell Reports, Torregrossa and two of her colleagues set up a Pavlovian experiment in which a group of … Read more

SCIENCE: Scientists Blast a Fake Asteroid Into A Fake Earth (And It’s Really Cool)

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asteroid cannon

Scientists at Brown University wanted to find out. So, they did what any one of us would do and built an indoor asteroid cannon — with a lot of help from NASA. The resulting study, published April 25 in the journal Science Advances, may sound ridiculous (or ridiculously awesome), but it aims to answer some of the most persistent questions in the science of planet formation. How did initially bone-dry planets get their water in the earliest days of the solar system? Why were traces of water discovered in the mantle of Earth’s parched moon or near the massive Tycho … Read more

SCIENCE: Sperm in Outer Space

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sperm - pixabay

For the first time, err, officially, NASA will set loose human sperm in outer space. The Micro-11 mission, which made its way to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s Dragon resupply capsule, amounts to a bunch of containers of frozen human and bull sperm. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), scientists will thaw the sperm, according to a NASA statement, and then study it to see how weightlessness affects its ability to move and prepare to fuse with an egg. “Previous experiments with sea urchin and bull sperm suggest that activating movement happens more quickly in microgravity,” NASA officials … Read more