Science

NASA confirmed an incredible discovery Tuesday - that an amateur radio astronomer, on the hunt for a classified government satellite, stumbled instead upon signals from a spacecraft that had been thought lost 12 years earlier, raising hope that NASA can resurrect a mission that changed our understanding of the "invisible ocean" around the Earth.

IMAGE was a machine designed to "see the invisible," as one of the mission's lead scientists once put it.

Brace yourself: The calorie-burning benefits of standing versus sitting will not, at first blush, blow you out of your seat. Spend a minute upright instead of seated, and the additional energy expended amounts to less than one-tenth of a calorie (0.04 of a calorie, to be exact).

But a new study that combines the best available research on sitting, standing and energy expenditure invites readers (reclining and otherwise) to consider the potential long-term effects of this seemingly marginal difference.

At more than 23m digits long, the number is something of a beast. But for mathematicians, the latest discovery from a global gang of enthusiasts is a thing of beauty: the largest prime number ever found.

Known simply as M77232917, the figure is arrived at by calculating two to the power of 77,232,917 and subtracting one, leaving a gargantuan string of 23,249,425 digits. The result is nearly one million digits longer than the previous record holder discovered in January 2016.

NASA and Google announced a "major discovery"on Thursday: another solar system with eight planets.

That finding is due to the discovery of a new planet, Kepler-90i - a hot, rocky orb circling a sun-like star called Kepler-90, which is 2,545 light-years from Earth.

The planet was found using a machine-learning system from Google, which was put to work sifting through data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Kepler, a space telescope that trails Earth in orbit around the sun, has stared down 145,000 sun-like stars over the years to look for signs of distant planets.

Self experimentation has a long history. Scientists have consumed, breathed in, and injected themselves with all manner of substances in the pursuit of scientific understanding. Some have even received Nobel prizes for putting themselves under the microscope. But with the advances in genetic engineering, none have altered their own DNA, in the name of science, until now.

Earlier this summer Google engineer James Damore posted a treatise about gender differences on an internal company message board and was subsequently fired. The memo ignited a firestorm of debate about sex discrimination in Silicon Valley; this followed months of reporting on accusations of harassment at Uber and elsewhere. Sex discrimination and harassment in tech, and in science more broadly, is a major reason why women leave the field.

Last August, Masahide Sasaki and his team instructed a satellite to shoot laser beams at a suburb of Tokyo. No, not like that. The laser beam, made of infrared light, was invisible to the human eye. By the time it had traveled through hundreds of miles of outer space and atmosphere, the light was harmless: It had spread out like a spotlight, about as wide as 10 soccer fields. Some of that light made its way into the end of a telescope, where it bounced off mirrors and flew through lenses and filters onto a photon-measuring detector.

In the early hours of 1st July, the SES Satellite Control reestablished contact to AMC-9. SES and the satellite manufacturer Thales are working around the clock to evaluate the status and define the next steps.

Tracking information received on 29 June had suggested that at least two separate objects were located in the vicinity of AMC-9. Their source has still to be determined. The new piece of information was included by Thales and SES in their investigations.

A team of astronomers working with Kepler Space telescope has found 219 new exoplanets. NASA released a list of 219 exoplanets discovered by astronomers over a period of four years using Kepler Space Telescope. 10 exoplanets among the latest list are in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone and their size is comparable to that of our planet Earth. These planets can support water in liquid form on their surface as they orbit at a suitable distance from their host star. Presence of water in liquid form is one of the main conditions for any exoplanet to support life.

Stroke patients who learned to use their minds to open and close a device fitted over their paralyzed hands gained some control over their hands, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

By mentally controlling the device with the help of a brain-computer interface, participants trained the uninjured parts of their brains to take over functions previously performed by injured areas of the brain, the researchers said.