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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory celebrates the mathematical marvel with a set of problems involving real space missions. Pi Day is the annual tribute to the mathematical constant pi, whose infinite number of decimals is usually rounded to 3.14. So what better day to celebrate than March 14? To find pi, aka the Greek letter p, you simply divide any circle’s circumference by its diameter. It’s a ratio that’s indispensable to NASA missions studying Earth, Mars, and beyond....

Twin lunar-orbiting NASA spacecraft that have allowed scientists to learn more about the internal structure and composition of the moon are being prepared for their controlled descent and impact on a mountain near the moon’s north pole at about 2:28 p.m. PST (5:28 p.m. EST) Monday, December 17. Ebb and Flow, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission probes, are being sent purposely into the lunar surface because their low orbit and low fuel levels preclude further scientific operations....

The Cassini Spacecraft made its 127th and final close approach to Titan on April 21 at 11:08 p.m. PDT, passing at an altitude of about 608 miles (979 kilometers) above the moon’s surface. Cassini transmitted its images and other data to Earth following the encounter. Astronomers with Cassini’s radar investigation will be looking this week at their final set of new radar images of the hydrocarbon seas and lakes that spread across Titan’s north polar region....

Pasadena, California – Saturn was playing the lightning storm blues. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured images of last year’s storm on Saturn, the largest storm seen up-close at the planet, with bluish spots in the middle of swirling clouds. Those bluish spots indicate flashes of lightning and mark the first time scientists have detected lightning in visible wavelengths on the side of Saturn illuminated by the sun. “We didn’t think we’d see lightning on Saturn’s day side – only its night side,” said Ulyana Dyudina, a Cassini imaging team associate based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena....

“Congratulations to NASA’s DART team and to our partners around the world who helped to make this mission a success,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “DART was a watershed moment for planetary defense. NASA will continue to build on that legacy to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us!” The award will be presented at the Space Foundation’s yearly opening ceremony of the Space Symposium in Colorado on April 17....

The solar wind of particles streaming off the sun helps drive flows and swirls in space as complicated as any terrestrial weather pattern. Scientists have now spotted at planet Mercury, for the first time, a classic space weather event called a hot flow anomaly, or HFA, which has previously been spotted at Earth, Venus, Saturn and Mars. “Planets have a bow shock the same way a supersonic jet does,” said Vadim Uritsky at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

TESS entered into safe mode on October 10 following a reset of its flight computer. The team will continue analyzing data to determine the cause. Launched in 2018, TESS has been scanning almost the entire sky looking for planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets. TESS has also uncovered other cosmic phenomena, including a white dwarf abruptly switching on and off, star-shredding black holes, and stellar oscillations. TESS surveys the entire sky over the course of two years by breaking it up into 26 different sectors, each 24 degrees by 96 degrees across....

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission has the challenging goal of crashing its spacecraft into a small asteroid on Monday, September 26. Its target is Dimorphos, a small moonlet orbiting a larger asteroid by the name of Didymos. Although the asteroid poses no threat to Earth, this mission will test technology that could be used to defend our planet against potential asteroid or comet hazards that may be detected in the future....

In the spirit of Halloween, scientists are releasing a trio of stellar ghosts caught in infrared light by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. All three spooky structures, called planetary nebulas, are in fact material ejected from dying stars. As death beckoned, the stars’ wispy bits and pieces were blown into outer space. “Some might call the images haunting,” said Joseph Hora of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, principal investigator of the Spitzer observing program....

NASA’s Terra satellite captured an image of the Kincaid wildfire located in Northern California’s Sonoma County which broke out on Wednesday night, October 23, 2019, and has grown to over 20,000 acres in less than 48 hours. This natural-color image was taken on October 24, 2019, by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on the Terra satellite. It pinpoints the area of the fire which is located in the scenic wine country of northern California and has forced the evacuation of over 2,000 people so far....

Late on December 17, teams at the launch site successfully completed encapsulation of the observatory inside the Ariane 5 rocket that will launch it to space. Webb’s final launch readiness review will be held on Tuesday, December 21 and, if successful, roll-out is planned for Wednesday, December 22. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the most powerful infrared science observatory ever to be sent into space....

This long pulse of mass loss, called a solitary wave, is a new discovery that may increase the potential for sustained ice loss in Greenland as the climate continues to warm, with implications for the future rate of sea level rise. The study by three scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was the first to precisely track a glacier’s loss of mass from melting ice using the horizontal motion of a GPS sensor....

Internal tides, or internal waves, can reach hundreds of feet underneath the ocean surface, but might only be a few inches high on the surface. Even though they’re underwater, NASA can see these tides from satellites. They provide oceanographers with a unique way to map and study the much larger internal water motion. Narration: Kathleen Gaeta Transcript: Tides are a complicated phenomenon. Tides in the ocean are generated by the moon’s gravitational pull, and they affect more than just how much room on the beach there is for a chair and umbrella....

Physicist Dr. Markus Rambach from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS) at The University of Queensland said the team was able to find unknown quantum states more quickly and accurately, using a technique called self-guided tomography. The team also introduced the ‘quvigint’, which is like a qubit (the quantum version of a classical bit that takes on the values ‘0’ or ‘1’) except that it takes on not two, but 20 possible values....

New research reveals Neem-based drugs may help fight future coronavirus variants. Extract from the bark of the Neem tree may help treat and reduce the spread of coronavirus, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata. The study, reported recently in the journal Virology, shows that components of Neem bark may target a wide range of viral proteins, suggesting its potential as an antiviral agent against emerging variants of coronaviruses (including SARS-CoV-2)....

Using a two-photon imaging microscope and a wealth of genetic tools, researchers from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), Columbia University, University College London, and Flatiron Institute found that neural networks become more focused as mice got better at performing a trained task. They used the data to construct computational models that can inform their understanding of the neuroscience behind decision-making. “We recorded the activity from hundreds of neurons all at the same time, and studied what the neurons did over learning,” said CSHL Associate Professor Anne Churchland....

Experts at Newcastle and Sussex universities, UK, also revealed that surviving brain cells in the brainstem have more copies of mitochondrial DNA and this has not been identified before. The study’s deeper understanding into Parkinson’s disease suggests a new target for therapies for patients with the debilitating condition. Researchers say their findings, published in Annals of Neurology, are “surprising” as the results differ from what has been seen in studies of brain regions that harbor other brain cell types....

Combining neuroscience with algorithms and network science, Yale researchers have developed a method of analyzing the neuronal connections of individual brains that allow them to successfully predict the subjects’ IQs, their sex, and even tasks they were performing at the time of the brain scan. In a collaboration between the labs of Amin Karbasi, assistant professor of electrical engineering & computer science, and Todd Constable, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and of neurosurgery, the researchers analyzed the functional MRI scans of more than 100 subjects from the Human Connectome Project, a five-year effort to create a network map of the human brain....

Neuroscientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) have taken a major step in their efforts to help people with memory loss tied to brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Using sea snail nerve cells, the scientists reversed memory loss by determining when the cells were primed for learning. The scientists were able to help the cells compensate for memory loss by retraining them through the use of optimized training schedules....

Frédéric Calon, a professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy and a researcher at the CHU de Québec-Laval University Research Center, headed the research that led to the finding. The findings might have an impact on the hunt for new Alzheimer’s drugs. “Several clinical trials are underway to assess the efficacy of diabetes drugs for Alzheimer’s disease,” said Professor Calon. “Our study shows that drugs do not need to cross the blood-brain barrier of microvessels to affect brain insulin resistance....