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Can Humans Play Red Rover?

Image credit: NASA Manned missions to Mars have captured the public imagination since the first sci-fi novels in the late 1800s allowed people to imagine what it might be like to explore the Red planet. But it is only in the past few years that such an…

The human body in space: Distinguishing fact from fiction

Since the first two-hour excursion into space by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the lure of manned space travel has proved irresistible to scientists, entrepreneurs, and entertainers alike. Today, as technology becomes more capable of enabling manned travel to…

Exoplanets

Revolving around the sun, in an orbit similar to our own, is NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft. Launched in 2009 and named after the Renaissance computer science homework help astronomer Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s mission, like that of many ground-based…

The Voyager Probes: A 35 Year Galactic Road Trip

As our closest astronomical neighbors, the planets have been subjects of keen observation by astronomers for over three millennia. The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, built and launched in the 1970s, flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and…

Reconstructing the History of the Milky Way

The Universe contains trillions of galaxies, and each galaxy is home to as many as a few hundred billion stars. To understand the Universe, it is necessary to study its building blocks, in the same way one studies atoms to understand the properties of a…

Near-Earth Objects: Is the sky really falling?

From the meteor that exploded over eastern Russia in February to the asteroid 1998 QE2 that squeaked by the Earth at the end of May 2013, meteoroids and other near-Earth objects (NEOs) have garnered increasing attention recently. NEOs, which include…

Making Old Hearts New

Although the heart is commonly thought of as something that causes us emotional joy and pain, while also providing us with the urge to make reckless decisions, we have to give it more credit. In actuality, this incredible organ will beat more than 2.5…

Thinking DNA damage into existence

Our brain contains billions of cells called neurons, each connected to one another in a complex network, permitting us to think, move, and assimilate information about our environment. While many cells in our body can talk to one another, neurons are…