Magazine Posts

"In 1634, Rembrandt painted his wife, Saskia, as Flora — the Roman goddess of flowers and spring. One large bloom droops over her left ear from the wreath crowning her head, dwarfing the other blossoms in scale and splendor — a single tulip, its silken petals aflame with stripes of red and white.These tulips no longer exist Today, their closest kin are known as Rembrandts". Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sunrise at the South Pole is different. Usually a welcome sight, it follows months of darkness -- and begins months of sunshine. At Earth's poles, it can take weeks for the Sun to rise, in contrast with just minutes at any mid-latitude location. Sunrise at a pole is caused by the tilt of the Earth as it orbits the Sun, not by the rotation of the Earth. Although at a pole, an airless Earth would first see first Sun at an equinox, the lensing effect of the Earth's atmosphere and the size of the solar disk causes the top of the Sun to appear about two-weeks early. Pictured two weeks ago, the Sun peeks above the horizon of a vast frozen landscape at Earth's South Pole. The true South Pole is just a few meters to the left of the communications tower. This polar sunrise capture was particularly photogenic as the Sun appeared capped by a green flash.

Photo by Martin WolfU. WisconsinIceCube Neutrino Obs.NSFhtAlice Allen

One of the most high-profile trials of the year is underway to decide whether Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes defrauded patients and investors. Read more

Author, Ana Santos Rutschman Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as the "Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The featured picture was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2002. These galactic mice will probably collide again and again over the next billion years so that, instead of continuing to pull each other apart, they coalesce to form a single galaxy. Follow APOD in English on: Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sure, you can see the 2D rectangle of colors, but can you see deeper? Counting color patches in the featured image, you might estimate that the most information that this 2D digital image can hold is about 60 (horizontal) x 50(vertical) x 256 (possible colors) = 768,000 bits. However, the yet-unproven Holographic Principle states that, counter-intuitively, the information in a 2D panel can include all of the information in a 3D room that can be enclosed by the panel. The principle derives from the idea that the Planck length, the length scale where quantum mechanics begins to dominate classical gravity, is one side of an area that can hold only about one bit of information. The limit was first postulated by physicist Gerard 't Hooft in 1993. It can arise from generalizations from seemingly distant speculation that the information held by a black hole is determined not by its enclosed volume but by the surface area of its event horizon. The term "holographic" arises from a hologram analogy where three-dimension images are created by projecting light through a flat screen. Beware, some people staring at the featured image may not think it encodes just 768,000 bits -- nor even 2563,000 bit permutations -- rather they might claim it encodes a three-dimensional teapot.

"A new review of 25 years of research finds acetaminophen may contribute to ADHD and other developmental disorders in children." Read more
The author, Ann Z. Bauer is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Epidemiology, University of Massachusetts Lowell

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Posing as a brilliant evening star, Venus lies near the western horizon in this southern hemisphere, early spring, night skyscape. To create the composite view exposures tracking the sky and fixed for the foreground were taken on September 25 from Cascavel in southern Brazil. In view after sunset, Venus appears immersed in a cone of zodiacal light, sunlight scattered from dust along the Solar System's ecliptic plane. In fact from either hemisphere of planet Earth, zodiacal light is most visible after sunset near a spring equinox, (or before sunrise near an autumn equinox) when its luminous arc lies at steep angles to the horizon. Extending above the sunset on this night, the zodiacal light reaches toward rich starfields and immense interstellar dust clouds in the bulge of the central Milky Way. Follow along the Milky Way from the central bulge back toward the horizon and you'll spot the closest star system to the Sun, Alpha Centauri, a mere 4.37 light-years away.

Photo by Rodrigo Guerra

Hold me close.
Hold me tight.
Say you love me.
Kiss me good night.

To the far side of never,
will make up this day.
Use the Sun as your lever
to pry up the haze,
as another tomorrow
is now on it's way.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Dark markings and colorful clouds inhabit this stellar landscape. The deep and expansive view spans more than 30 full moons across crowded star fields toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard, the obscuring interstellar dust clouds seen toward the right include B59, B72, B77 and B78, part of the Ophiuchus molecular cloud complex a mere 450 light-years away. To the eye their combined shape suggests a pipe stem and bowl, and so the dark nebula's popular name is the Pipe Nebula. Three bright nebulae gathered on the left are stellar nurseries some 5,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Sagittarius. In the 18th century astronomer Charles Messier included two of them in his catalog of bright clusters and nebulae; M8, the largest of the triplet, and colorful M20 just above. The third prominent emission region includes NGC 6559 at the far left. Itself divided by obscuring dust lanes, M20 is also known as the Trifid. M8's popular moniker is the Lagoon Nebula.

Photo by Gabriel Rodrigues Santos

The cave was dark,
the light was dim,
dampness in the air.
A cave of lost souls,
filled with their despair.
Souls residing in the cave;
Lost because no one cared.