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More than 150 years have passed since novelist Jules Verne wrote “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” but reality has yet to catch up with that science fiction adventure. While humans can’t bore a path to our planet’s metallic core, NASA has its sights set on visiting a giant asteroid that may be the frozen remains of the molten core of a bygone world. Called Psyche, this asteroid orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter....

The Lucy mission is already breaking records by planning to visit nine asteroids during its 12-year tour of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. Originally, Lucy was not scheduled to get a close-up view of any asteroids until 2025, when it will fly by the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson. However, the Lucy team identified a small, as-yet unnamed asteroid in the inner main belt, designated (152830) 1999 VD57, as a potential new and useful target for the Lucy spacecraft....

NASA and SpaceX are now targeting no earlier than 11:35 a.m. EDT (8:35 a.m. PDT) on Friday, October 14, for the Crew-4 undocking from the (ISS) to begin their return trip to Earth completing a nearly six-month science mission in orbit. Splashdown is targeted several hours later at approximately 4:50 p.m. off the coast of Florida. Mission teams continued to monitor a cold front passing through Florida on Thursday, October 13, which brought high winds and rainy weather near the splashdown zones off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts....

Crew-5 will carry two NASA astronauts – Mission Commander Nicole Aunapu Mann and Pilot Josh Cassada – along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, who will serve as mission specialists, to the International Space Station. The public is invited to take part in virtual activities and events ahead of the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission. Liftoff is targeted for noon EDT on Wednesday, October 5, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida....

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft Endeavour, powered by the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, will carry NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev on a 25-hour trip to the space station. The crew will dock at approximately 2:38 a.m. EST on Tuesday, February 28, remaining onboard the microgravity laboratory for up to six months to conduct science and maintenance. Starting at 10:15 p....

Working together, a range of Webb’s high-resolution infrared instruments reveal the stars, structure, and composition of the nebula with a level of detail not previously possible. Astronomers will use Webb throughout its mission to gain insight into star formation and the stellar lifecycle. The implications of this extend to our own star, the Sun, as well as the formation of the heavy chemical elements that are essential to life as we know it....

Answering them will set a boundary between objects that form like stars, which are born out of gravitationally collapsing clouds of gas and dust, and those that form like planets, which are created when gas and dust clump together in a disk around a young star. It will also distinguish among competing ideas about the origins of brown dwarfs, objects with masses between 1% and 8% of the Sun that cannot sustain hydrogen fusion at their cores....

While sea ice is mostly white and reflects the sun’s rays, ocean water is dark and absorbs the sun’s energy at a higher rate. A decline in the region’s albedo – its reflectivity, in effect – has been a key concern among scientists since the summer Arctic sea ice cover began shrinking in recent decades. As more of the sun’s energy is absorbed by the climate system, it enhances ongoing warming in the region, which is more pronounced than anywhere else on the planet....

The water cycle is the catch-all phrase to describe the movement of water – in its different forms, e.g., liquid, gas and solid – around the planet. It includes freshwater used in households and for agriculture, so any changes to the patterns of where rain and snow occur due to the changing climate may have huge impacts for communities worldwide. The study is a rigorous accounting of the movements of Earth’s water from 2000 to 2010, and the first to rely solely on satellite observations and data-integrating models....

In the first study, the team will gain knowledge of dark matter by measuring the motions of stars in two dwarf companions to the Milky Way. In the second study, they will examine the motions of four dwarf galaxies around our nearest large galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. This will help determine if some of Andromeda’s satellite galaxies orbit inside a flat plane, like the planets around our Sun. If they do, that would have important implications for understanding galaxy formation....

For the mission, astronauts Scott Tingle and Mike Fincke of NASA will serve as the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft commander and pilot, respectively. Both astronauts have previously flown as crew members aboard the space station. NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps remains assigned as a mission specialist on Starliner-1. She also continues cross-training on the Dragon spacecraft to protect for other flight opportunities. The agency’s Starliner crew rotation missions to the space station will carry four crew members at a time....

Gluons are elementary particles that are responsible for “gluing” together quarks and anti-quarks to form protons and neutrons — so, gluons play a role in about 98% of all the visible matter in the universe. Previous experiments at the now-decommissioned HERA electron-proton collider found when protons are accelerated close to light speed, the density of gluons inside them increases very rapidly. “In these cases, gluons split into pairs of gluons with lower energies, and such gluons split themselves subsequently, and so forth,” said Tapia Takaki, KU associate professor of physics & astronomy....

A team of scientists from Princeton University and the University of Bristol, UK, have discovered traces of dairy fat in ancient ceramic fragments, indicating that humans have been making cheese in Europe for up to 7,500 years. Early dairy farmers probably devised cheese-making as a way to preserve milk. The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. In the 1980s, it was thought that Neolithic farmers had found a way to preserve milk as early as 5,500 BC....

However, that’s not all the engineers will be closely tracking. They will have to keep a look out for more than 47,000 satellites, debris, and other objects circling our planet. A greater than 1-10,000 chance that Lucy will collide with one of these objects, and mission engineers will be required to slightly adjust the spacecraft’s trajectory. Although an adjustment is unlikely, and collisions are rare, NASA experts say the chances are increasing as the number of objects in Earth’s orbit grows....

New Brain Study Shows How Obeying Orders Can Dull Our Empathy War atrocities are sometimes committed by ‘normal’ people obeying orders. Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience measured brain activity while participants inflicted pain and found that obeying orders reduced empathy and guilt related brain activity for the inflicted pain. This may explain why people are able to commit immoral acts under coercion. Many examples in the history of mankind have shown that when people obey orders from an authority, they are able to perform atrocious acts towards others....

Just in time for the holidays, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn for more than eight years now, has delivered another glorious, backlit view of the planet Saturn and its rings. On October 17, 2012, during its 174th orbit around the gas giant, Cassini was deliberately positioned within Saturn’s shadow, a perfect location from which to look in the direction of the sun and take a backlit view of the rings and the dark side of the planet....

This design program could allow researchers to build DNA scaffolds to anchor arrays of proteins and light-sensitive molecules called chromophores that mimic the photosynthetic proteins found in plant cells, or to create new delivery vehicles for drugs or RNA therapies, says Mark Bathe, an associate professor of biological engineering. “The general idea is to spatially organize proteins, chromophores, RNAs, and nanoparticles with nanometer-scale precision using DNA. The precise nanometer-scale control that we have over 3D architecture is what is centrally unique in this approach,” says Bathe, the senior author of a paper describing the new design approach in the December 3 issue of Nature Communications....

Health experts agree that expanded testing is crucial for controlling the spread of COVID-19. However, testing in many countries, including the U.S., has lagged behind because of limited supplies of some reagents and a backlog of samples awaiting available PCR machines and laboratory personnel. In addition, a number of false-negative and -positive test results have been reported. Other methods, such as computed tomography (known as “CT”) scanning and culturing, do not provide quick or real time results....

A new tool using cutting-edge technology is able to distinguish different types of blood clots based on what caused them, according to a study published in eLife. The tool could help physicians diagnose what caused a blood clot and help them select a treatment that targets cause to break it up. For example, it could help them determine if aspirin or another kind of anti-clotting drug would be the best choice for a person who has just had a heart attack or stroke....

Evidence for these milestones in humans’ evolutionary past comes from the Olorgesailie Basin in southern Kenya, which holds an archaeological record of early human life spanning more than a million years. The new discoveries, reported in three studies published on March 15 in the journal Science, indicate that these behaviors emerged during a period of tremendous environmental variability in the region. As earthquakes remodeled the landscape and climate fluctuated between wet and dry conditions, technological innovation, social exchange networks, and early symbolic communication would have helped early humans survive and obtain the resources they needed despite unpredictable conditions, the scientists say....