We’ve missed you Pluto. (via Thrillist)
A new paper argues that Pluto should be considered a planet again.
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On Jan. 1, NASA’s New Horizons will perform a high-risk, high-reward flyby of an ancient world on the outskirts of the solar system.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is just over 100 days away from a high-risk, high-reward flyby of an ancient world on the outskirts of the solar system.
On New Year’s Day 2019, the spacecraft will come within 3,500 kilometers of 2014 MU69, an estimated 37-kilometer-wide object the mission team has nicknamed Ultima Thule. The encounter will take place 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth, where it takes more than 6 hours for radio signals traveling at the speed of light to reach NASA’s Deep Space Network.
There will only be one chance for New Horizons to perfectly aim its cameras and science instruments at Ultima Thule as it zips past at 14 kilometers per second, and there may be unforeseen hazards in the spacecraft’s path. Nevertheless, Jim Green, the director of NASA’s planetary science division, is looking forward to the drama.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered never-before-seen features around a neutron star.
An unusual infrared light emission from the nearby orb could indicate a dusty disk, or an energetic wind coming off the object and slamming into interstellar gas.
Either or.
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Giving millions of patients already taking statins a new type of drug could slash their heart disease risk even further, research suggests.
Scientists claim pills that are currently under development, called lipoprotein lipase (LPL) enhancers, could prevent thousands of heart attacks.
And their study also showed the drugs — which work by lowering levels of fats in the blood — could also slash the risk of type 2 diabetes.
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Computer scientists at MIT have developed a machine-learning system that can identify objects in an image based on a spoken description of the image.
Typical speech recognition systems like Google Voice and Siri rely on transcriptions of thousands of hours of speech recordings, which are then used to map speech signals to specific words.
Still in its early stages, the MIT system learns words from recorded speech clips and objects in images and then links them. Several hundred different works and objects can be recognized so far, with expectations that future versions can advance to a larger scale.
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