Joanna Thompson

1 week ago | space.com | Joanna Thompson

NEW YORK — NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has stood on a Manhattan corner near Columbia University's campus since 1966. The institute, called GISS for short, shares the building with Tom's Restaurant, a diner made famous by its regular appearance on the hit sitcom "Seinfeld." As George and Jerry discussed their dating lives over coffee, scientists two floors up were busy developing probes for NASA's Voyager program and analyzing the composition of Earth's atmosphere.

2 weeks ago | livescience.com | Joanna Thompson

If you've ever poured milk into a cup of coffee and watched it swirl, you've seen turbulence in action. This phenomenon is responsible for everything from a bumpy airplane trip to ocean currents. Now, researchers have developed a way to visualize in unprecedented detail the turbulence within the interstellar medium — the clouds of gas and charged particles between stars — and how it interacts with magnetic fields. The model was described in a paper published May 13 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

2 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Joanna Thompson

It was early January when Blake Shook realized the bees were in trouble. Shook, the CEO of a beekeeping outfit called Desert Creek, was coordinating California’s annual almond pollination, the largest such event in the world. The affair requires shipping nearly 2 million honeybee colonies from all across the country to California orchards. But this year, Shook’s contacts were coming up short. Their bees were all dead.

3 weeks ago | livescience.com | Joanna Thompson

The oldest star chart in the world was made in China more than 2,300 years ago, a hotly debated preprint study finds. Researchers at the Chinese National Astronomical Observatories analyzed the "Star Manual of Master Shi," the oldest surviving star catalog in China, using a novel digital image processing technique. The method, called Generalized Hough Transform, uses a type of artificial intelligence known as computer vision to find and mitigate significant errors between similar images.

3 weeks ago | scientificamerican.com | Joanna Thompson

Sperm have to wiggle vigorously to reach an egg, and that motion is key to a clever new fertility test. The technique, tested with bull semen and detailed in Advanced Materials Interfaces, harnesses physics to make fertility testing easier and more cost-effective—and, if it works for human sperm, too, it might eventually help people tackle some conception issues from home.