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A image acquired by the Juno spacecraft and processed by a citizen scientist reveals the Red Spot in subtly beautiful natural color Back on July 10th, NASA's Juno spacecraft swooped low over Jupiter's Great Red Spot for the seventh time. Since then we've been treated to some spectacular imagery — almost all of it enhanced to bring out various features in the persistent 10,000-mile-wide storm. But what would it look like to human eyes if a person could have been aboard Juno? The image abo

Oh, kids these days. When they want to know something they Google it. When they want to buy something they go to Amazon. When they want to date someone they open Tinder. It's almost like they're from a different country, one where technology has bled into every aspect of life. These so-called "digital natives" are endowed with the ability to seamlessly interact with any device, app or interface, and have migrated many aspects of their lives to the Internet. This is all to the detriment of

Okay, to be more accurate, Cassini produced a noodle. Well, actually, it's a noddle-shaped movie. Sort of... Yes, my tongue is poking into my cheek — but only part way. NASA's just come out with a Cassini spacecraft movie that takes us on a swooping journey low over Saturn's cloud tops. And, in fact, the video pans across something the agency's imaging wizards really are calling a "noodle." I happen to think it looks more like a nematode than a noodle, or maybe a hookworm. But you can

Toss a few droplets of water in a hot pan and they seem to come alive, skittering to and fro as if trying to escape. Try the same thing with balls of hydrogel, and they actually could break free. The spheres bounce animatedly about a hot pan, emitting a piercing, shrieking noise as they do so. Both tricks are due to something called the Leidenfrost effect, which describes the instantaneous vaporization that occurs when water touches a hot surface. If enough steam is produced, it can be en

Tang, the orange flavoured breakfast drink, is so synonymous with NASA that people seem to think the space agency invented it. Even Homer Simpson somehow called up NASA to demand why he couldn't get "no Tang 'round here!" But contrary to popular belief NASA didn't invent Tang. That honour goes to William Mitchell, the guy who also invented Pop Rocks and Cool Whip. The short version of the story is that Charles William “C. W.” Post went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the early 1890s. At th

To many women, craving chocolate every month is a way of life. But what if we told you that this craving might not be biological, but social? Indeed, according to this study, hankering for chocolate during menstruation is much more common in second and third generation American women than foreign-born immigrants. The authors hypothesize that American women are taught by society that it's OK to indulge during their period "perhaps in an effort to justify consumption of an otherwise 'forbidden

It has been expected for awhile, and now it has finally happened: Two tropical systems in the Northeast Pacific spun around each other in a kind of cyclonic do-si-do — and then the bigger one ate most of the smaller one. As of Tuesday evening (in the U.S.), the cannibal cyclone, Typhoon Noru, has continued on with Category-1-strength winds of about 70 knots, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Meanwhile, a remnant of the victim, Tropical Storm Kulap, has spun off as a puny litt

Chilled out or worked up? Most of us can pick up pretty quickly on another human's state of emotional arousal. But Charles Darwin hypothesized that understanding emotional expression across species went way, way back, all the way to the earliest terrestrial vertebrates (that's 350 million years, give or take), and that it was crucial for survival. After all, it's kinda helpful to know if those monkeys in the trees are just yammering on about nothing or freaking out about the lion they see

Paint a room in light colors to make it look bigger. Wear black to look slimmer. These are well known facts about how color influences our perception—but it's not all black and white. New research from Boston College is showing that color saturation — how pure a color is — affects how we perceive an objects' size. The more saturated a color is, the bigger something looks, the researchers say, with attendant implications for marketing and design. More than that, however, their findings als

Flying cars are up against a wall — literally. Turning aircraft into street-safe machines requires manufacturers to prove their safety standards in crash tests. So at least one expensive prototype needs to get smashed to smithereens, while its dummy passengers survive. This is no small financial hurdle, and for a decade the industry has been just a few years away from getting models street-certified. Flying Cars, or Driveable Planes? Farthest along, perhaps, are the MIT-graduate founders o