This is what NASA's Insight lander looks like on Mars. With its solar panels, InSight is about the size of a small bus. Insight successfully landed on Mars in November with a main objective to detect seismic activity. The featured selfie is a compilation of several... Continue Reading →
Tonight a bright full Moon will fade to red. Tonight's moon will be particularly bright because it is reaching its fully lit phase when it is relatively close to the Earth in its elliptical orbit. In fact, by some measures of size and... Continue Reading →
Very common and familiar species (as its name indicates it), the European Robin is really the king of the gardens. Rather solitary outside the breeding season, it is very close to us in winter, begging some bread crumbs at the... Continue Reading →
How does your brain decide what to do in a threatening situation? A paper published in Nature describes a mechanism by which the brain classifies the level of a threat and decides when to escape. Escaping from a dangerous situation is crucial... Continue Reading →
Dogs are capable of understanding the emotions behind an expression on a human face. For example, if a dog turns its head to the left, it could be picking up that someone is angry, fearful or happy. If there is... Continue Reading →
This tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever. Measuring slightly over one tenth of a millimeter, the ball moves toward a smooth plate in response to energy fluctuations in the vacuum of empty space. The attraction is known as... Continue Reading →
"I believe in new ideas, in progress. It’s faith. I’ve recently been thinking about faith. If you’re a religious person, which I’m not, you believe God created the universe. That’s why it works, and you’re trying to understand God’s works.... Continue Reading →
Stress in early childhood leads to faster maturation of certain brain regions during adolescence. In contrast, stress experienced later in life leads to slower maturation of the adolescent brain. This is the outcome of a long-term study conducted by researchers... Continue Reading →
It’s the comparative silence between the firing spikes of neurons that tells what they are really up to, scientists report. “The brain appears to use these durations of silence to encrypt information,” Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, neuroscientist at the Medical... Continue Reading →
Scents of Science 