NASA missions may re-elevate Pluto and Ceres as full-on planets This article was written by David A Weintraub, Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, and was originally published by The Conversation. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will arrive at this dwarf planet on March 6, 2015. Pluto is the largest object in the Kuiper belt, and NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will arrive at this dwarf planet on July 15, 2015. These two events will make 2015 an exciting year for Solar System exploration and discovery. But there is much more to this story than mere science. The efforts of a very small clique of Pluto-haters within the International Astronomical Union (IAU) plutoed Pluto in 2006. Ceres and Pluto are both spheroidal objects, like Mercury, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. Unlike the larger planets, however, Ceres, like Pluto, according to the IAU definition, “has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.” Ceres, temporarily a planet But Ceres does still stand out. Pluto’s short planetary reign
Death Is Optional KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities? HARARI: I think about it in visual terms, whether you try to narrow your field of vision, or to broaden it. For example, when you try to predict the weather for tomorrow, there are a lot of possibilities to begin with. It might rain, it might snow, there might be sunshine. And after you finish reading the book or taking the course or whatever, your view of the world in this sense is narrower, because you have fewer possibilities to consider. There is room of course for that. KAHNEMAN: But do you get to a broader view by becoming more differentiated, that is, by having more detailed views? HARARI: Mainly, the second way. Let me give you an example that I'm thinking about a lot today, concerning the future of humankind in the field of medicine. KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. KAHNEMAN: Yes.
This is how much a cloud weighs This piece was written by Hannah Earnshaw, a PhD student at Durham University in the UK, and was originally published by The Conversation. I have always been in awe of the night sky, trying to comprehend the vastness of space and the countless wonders it contains. But I have always felt a certain dissatisfaction with only being able to see it at a distance. One day I imagine that humanity will be able to visit other planets in the Solar System, and venture even further to other stars, but this has always seemed very far away. That’s the reason why I applied for the Mars One mission, aimed at starting a human colony on Mars – it seemed like a real opportunity to get closer to the rest of the night sky, to give me a chance to be a part of taking humanity into the stars. Mars is, in a way, the perfect stepping stone into the rest of the universe. Science, but more than science Life on the Martian range. The journey of a lifetime
Researchers have found a DNA “clock” that predicts how long you’ll live Nicknamed ‘graphene’s cousin’, silicene - a form of silicon made from a two-dimensional lattice structure of silicon atoms - has been touted as a super-material in its own right, and now, computer engineers in the US have managed to make a transistor out of this notoriously tricky material. This feat, achieved by computer engineer Deji Akinwande from the University of Texas and his team, has proven for the first time that silicene can be stabilised and sandwiched into a functioning transistor device - something no one thought would even be possible. Scientists have theorised about the existence of silicene for over two decades, but it wasn’t until 2010 that anyone was actually able to make it. “For logic applications, graphene is hopeless,” Guy Le Lay, a materials scientist at Aix-Marseille University in France, told Peplow. “If we can get good properties out of it, it can be translated immediately by the semiconductor industry,” Akinwande told her. We’re excited to see what comes next.
Why Don't Animals Get Schizophrenia (and How Come We Do)? Many of us have known a dog on Prozac. We've also witnessed the eye rolls that come with canine psychiatry. Doting pet owners—myself included—ascribe all sorts of questionable psychological ills to our pawed companions. But the science does suggest that numerous non-human species suffer from psychiatric symptoms. Birds obsess; horses on occasion get pathologically compulsive; dolphins and whales—especially those in captivity—self-mutilate. But there’s at least one mental malady that, while common in humans, seems to have spared all other animals: schizophrenia. The study, led by Mount Sinai researcher Dr. To find out, Dudley and colleagues used data culled from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, a massive study identifying genetic variants associated with schizophrenia. To help understand what these benefits might be, Dudley’s group then turned to gene expression profiles. Dudley is careful not to exaggerate the evolutionary implications of his work.
The Trip Treatment - The New Yorker On an April Monday in 2010, Patrick Mettes, a fifty-four-year-old television news director being treated for a cancer of the bile ducts, read an article on the front page of the Times that would change his death. His diagnosis had come three years earlier, shortly after his wife, Lisa, noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs and he was buckling under the weight of a debilitating chemotherapy regimen and the growing fear that he might not survive. The article, headlined “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning in Again,” mentioned clinical trials at several universities, including N.Y.U., in which psilocybin—the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms—was being administered to cancer patients in an effort to relieve their anxiety and “existential distress.” Patrick made the call anyway and, after filling out some forms and answering a long list of questions, was accepted into the trial. The clinical trials at N.Y.U.
Scientists have found the region of the brain that controls addictive overeating I don’t want to alarm you, but your metadata is showing, and can lead people straight to your credit card details. Scientists have found that 90 percent of the time, they need just four pieces of outside information on you - for example, what store you shopped at on a given day, what you bought, how much an item cost - to match an anonymised credit card record to your identity. The team, led by computer scientist Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, analysed three months of credit card records belonging to 1.1 million people. The records had been stripped of any personal information, including names and account numbers, which is what companies routinely do when they sell data about you and your purchases to other companies. The team then gathered information from 10,000 shops, and information readily available about individuals online, such as their tweets, Instagram photos, and Facebook updates. So, what's the solution?
Celestial Nomad Takes Centre Stage | ESO In this new ESO image, nightfall raises the curtain on a theatrical display taking place in the cloudless skies over La Silla. A meteor adds its own streak of light to the scene, seeming to plunge into the hazy pool of green light collecting along the horizon. The telescopes of La Silla provide an audience for this celestial performance, and a thin shroud of low altitude cloud clings to the plain below the observatory streaked by the Panamericana Highway. Comet Lovejoy’s long tail is being pushed away from the comet by the solar wind. This is the first time the comet has passed through the inner Solar System and ignited so spectacularly in over 11 000 years. This image was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek during a visit to La Silla in January 2015. Credit: