Nearly 50 years after it was collected, a lunar sample from the Apollo 17 mission has finally been opened at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. It’s one of the last unopened samples from the final Apollo mission to land humans on the moon.

“We have had an opportunity to open up this incredibly precious sample that’s been saved for 50 years under vacuum and we finally get to see what treasures are held within,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a statement.

It was collected by NASA astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt in December 1972 when they hammered 14-inch (36-centimeter) cylindrical drive tubes into a landslide deposit in the Taurus-Littrow Valley. The two astronauts vacuum-sealed the tube while still on the lunar surface.

Statement from members of the earth and space science international community.

We are Earth and space scientists, science communicators, and educators dedicated to the discovery of and solutions to societal challenges. We issue this joint statement to call on world governments and global leaders to do everything possible to expedite the end to the brutal Russian assault on Ukraine. We welcome other professional scientific communities to join our appeal.

1. The Earth and Space Community is an ecosystem of researchers working together and supporting each other. At this moment, our colleagues in Ukraine are being shelled with missiles and many have been forced to escape with their families from the war zone. We salute “Science for Ukraine” grassroots efforts and urge world governments to support Ukrainian students and science professionals.

“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe,” observes physicist Michio Kaku. The neocortex, observed Carl Sagan is where “matter is transformed into consciousness.” Located deep in the brain’s center, the subcortex, the most evolutionarily ancient part of our brain, processes everything from our basic senses to long-term memories.

“Most Perfectly Organized Part”

Noble Prize laureate Roger Penrose suggest that the human brain and its cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper, is more complex than our Milky Way Galaxy. “If you look at the entire physical cosmos,” Penrose says, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they’re the most perfectly organized part.”

Odd radio circles, or ORCs, are so massive that they measure about a million light-years across — 16 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy. Now, astronomers have captured the best image yet of these strange celestial objects.