Modern science reveals ancient secret in Japanese literature

Nearly a millennium and a half ago, red light streaked across the night sky over Japan. Witnesses compared it to the tail of a pheasant—it appeared as a fan of beautiful red feathers stretched across the sky. Since the ...

Betelgeuse continues to dim, diminishes to 1.506 magnitude

Betelgeuse keeps getting dimmer, and everyone is wondering what exactly that means. The star will go supernova at the end of its life, but that's not projected to happen for tens of thousands of years or so. So what's causing ...

Martian aurora offers climate change clues, research reports

A newly published study, presented on Dec. 12 at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting, reveals that a type of Martian aurora originally detected by NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is in fact the most common aurora on the ...

Researchers show how railroad worms produce red light

A research group comprising Brazilian and Japanese scientists has discovered how luciferase produced by the railroad worm Phrixothrix hirtus emits red light. Luciferase is an enzyme that catalyzes the oxidation of luciferin ...

Pavlov's classical conditioning inspires materials scientists

Researchers have successfully trained a material to respond to an originally neutral stimulus, a gel that can be taught to melt without needing heating. Their work, recently published in Nature Communications, was inspired ...

Image: Hubble's portrait of star's gaseous glow

Although it looks more like an entity seen through a microscope than a telescope, this rounded object, named NGC 2022, is certainly not algae or tiny, blobby jellyfish. Instead, it is a vast orb of gas in space, cast off ...

Black moon event bridges fiction, mythology and science

For those looking up at the sky tonight in North America, you may notice something missing—the moon! That's because July 31 marks a lunar event called the "black moon" which is the second new moon that happens in one calendar ...

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