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Friday, December 26, 2014

WIRED Science

SCIENCE

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NASA’s Best Images of Earth From Space in 2014

Green River, Utah
This stretch of the Green River in eastern Utah is known as the Bowknot Bend for obvious reasons. This image was taken by an astronaut aboard the ISS on  Jan 22.
There are many great Earth-observing satellites circling the planet these days. Digital Globe's new WorldView 3 has incredible 30-centimeter resolution, and Planet Lab's flock of minisatellites may someday soon be able to image every spot on Earth, every single day. But taken together, NASA has by far the best collection of satellites designed to monitor the planet.
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Holiday Travel? Get Vaccinated First, or Bring Home Something Unexpected

Angelo DeSantis (CC), Flickr
Happy holidays, constant readers. If you’re like many people, you may be preparing to take a trip, maybe for a break from winter, maybe just to see family. As you’re getting ready, making sure to decant the toiletries and pack the presents unwrapped, here’s one thing not to forget: your vaccinations. Really, this is important. […]
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Why Is Rosetta’s Comet Shaped Like a Duck?

The two lobes of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko somewhat resemble the head and body of a duck.
SAN FRANCISCO—As scientists continue to pore over new images and data from the Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, clues are emerging that may help answer a puzzling question: Why is this comet shaped like a duck? The comet consists of two lobes, which, if you squint, look a bit like the head and body of a duck. […]
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On the Front Lines of Ebola’s Most Pressing Mystery

ebola-antibody-ft
KENEMA, Sierra Leone—Alex Moigboi was panicking. He was preparing to enter the Ebola ward wearing just a pair of gloves and a plastic gown over his scrubs. It was totally inadequate—like a firefighter entering a burning building wearing a pair of Ray-Bans—and Alex knew it. But he couldn’t find the rest of the protective gear […]
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The Best Science Visualizations of the Year

A new method of analyzing our brain's electrical activity finds neural signatures of consciousness. At right is a healthy person's activity; at left and center are two people with brain injuries. Both are in vegetative states, but one displays patterns suggestive of healthy function.
Here at Wired Science, we're big fans of science graphics. And not just the fancy, big-budget ones, but charts and figures and visualizations: the folk art of scientific imagery. In this gallery are our favorite graphics of the year.
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7 of the Ocean’s Strangest Creatures, Including a Fish With a Flashlight

fish-ft
This is the final part of a five-part series on the specimen collections at the California Academy of Sciences, and I feel like it’s only appropriate for us to return to our roots with it. So in the gallery above you’ll find the most remarkable fish that senior collections manager David Catania could muster (from the 220,000 or so jars in the museum's stacks), from shark eggs that look like spiral grenades to the ancient and mysterious coelacanth. They may not look much like us, but we owe their kind a debt of gratitude for us, like, existing.
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An Orangutan Has (Some) Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules

Sandra, a 28-year-old orangutan now living at the Buenos Aires Zoo.
An orangutan named Sandra has become the first non-human animal recognized as a person in a court of law. An Argentine appeals court declared on Friday that the 28-year-old great ape, who is owned by the Buenos Aires Zoo, is a "non-human person" who has been wrongfully deprived of her freedom. 
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G-Forces in the Millennium Falcon

Screen Shot 2014-12-22 at 9.11.55 AM
In the Star Wars VII trailer, we see the Millennium Falcon pulling out of a dive. How many g-forces in this turn?
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The Best and Worst in a Tumultuous Year for Science

In January, scientists reported what seemed like a huge breakthrough: a simple way to turn almost any kind of cell into stem cells by exposing them to acid or other stresses. As other scientists tried to replicate the findings, the story quickly unraveled in tragic fashion. The lead researcher, Haruko Obokata (above), was found guilty of misconduct, the papers were retracted, and her supervisor and co-author hanged himself.
It's been a roller-coaster year for science. It started with what looked like a remarkable breakthrough in stem cell science, which was soon followed by a stunning announcement by cosmologists: the first detection of gravitational waves, direct evidence for a popular theory of how the universe began. But as the year draws to a close, the first of these discoveries has been thoroughly discredited, and the second appears to be on the ropes. 
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Mathematicians Make a Major Discovery About Prime Numbers

Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, said this is the first Erdős prize problem he has been able to solve.
A year after tackling how close together prime number pairs can stay, mathematicians have now made the first major advance in 76 years in understanding how far apart primes can be.
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Centaurs, Soviets, and Seltzer Seas: Mariner 2’s Venusian Adventure (1962)

Mariner 2.
Hydrogen is the most common kind of normal matter in the universe. Perhaps the universe is trying to tell us something, for the most common chemical element makes an excellent energetic rocket fuel. That does not mean, however, that it is easy to manage. Odorless and colorless hydrogen gas becomes liquid, and thus dense enough […]
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This Week’s Weirdest Wild Animal Encounters

Orangutan mother Mali and baby Tatau open Christmas presents at Paignton Zoo, Devon, Britain, Dec. 15, 2014.
A feral cat broke into a Russian airport and ate $1,000 worth of seafood, a black bear beat up a Santa Claus, and a tiger released into the wild by Vladimir Putin was caught on camera devouring a pet dog in China for two hours.

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