After the Crab Nebula, this giant star cluster is the second entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous list of things that are not comets. M2 is one of the largest globular star clusters now known to roam the... Continue Reading →
Just as a conductor coordinates different instruments in an orchestra to produce a symphony, breathing coordinates hippocampal brain waves that strengthen memory while we sleep, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.... Continue Reading →
Step into a hidden world so small it’s almost unimaginable — the nanoscale. Imagine a single strand of hair and shrink it a million times, and you’re there. Here, atoms and molecules are master builders, creating new properties yet to... Continue Reading →
What kind of strange galaxy is this? This rare structure is known as a polar ring galaxy, and it seems to have two different rings of stars. In this galaxy, NGC 660, one ring of bright stars, gas, and dark dust appears... Continue Reading →
In a quiet village nestled between two vast mountains, there lived an old clockmaker named Eli. He spent his days surrounded by ticking clocks, each one handmade, each one a small piece of his soul. Travelers would come from far... Continue Reading →
Obesity affects a staggering 40 percent of adults and 20 percent of children in the United States. While some new popular therapies are helping to tackle the epidemic of obesity, there is still so much that researchers do not understand... Continue Reading →
What excites the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula on the upper left, catalogued as IC 1805, looks somewhat like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element, hydrogen, but this long-exposure image was also blended with light... Continue Reading →
It started as a whisper. Barely audible, it curled around the edges of my thoughts the first time I saw them together, his hand brushing her arm, her laugh echoing too sweetly in the air. I told myself it was... Continue Reading →
The first-ever photo of a black hole rocked the world in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, published an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, also known as Virgo A or... Continue Reading →