The Deers Ears

Illustrations by Simon Prades ( b. in 1985, based in Saarbrücken, Germany )

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The Sun may look unchanging to us here on Earth, but that’s not the whole story.

In visible light – the light our eyes can see – the Sun looks like an almost featureless orange disk, peppered with the occasional sunspot. (Important note: Never look at the Sun directly, and always use a proper filter for solar viewing – or tune in to our near-real time satellite feeds!)

But in other kinds of light, it’s a different picture. The Sun emits light across the electromagnetic spectrum, including the relatively narrow range of light we can see, as well as wavelengths that are invisible to our eyes. Different wavelengths convey information about different components of the Sun’s surface and atmosphere, so watching the Sun in multiple types of light helps us paint a fuller picture.

Watching the Sun in these wavelengths reveals how active it truly is. This image, captured in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light at 131 Angstroms, shows a solar flare. Solar flares are intense bursts of light radiation caused by magnetic events on the Sun, and often associated with sunspots. The light radiation from solar flares can disturb part of Earth’s atmosphere where radio signals travel, causing short-lived problems with communications systems and GPS.

Looking at the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light also reveals structures like coronal loops (magnetic loops traced out by charged particles spinning along magnetic field lines)…

…solar prominence eruptions…

…and coronal holes (magnetically open areas on the Sun from which solar wind rushes out into space).

Though extreme ultraviolet light shows the Sun’s true colors, specialized instruments let us see some of the Sun’s most significant activity in visible light.

A coronagraph is a camera that uses a solid disk to block out the Sun’s bright face, revealing the much fainter corona, a dynamic part of the Sun’s atmosphere. Coronagraphs also reveal coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, which are explosions of billions of tons of solar material into space. Because this material is magnetized, it can interact with Earth’s magnetic field and trigger space weather effects like the aurora, satellite problems, and even – in extreme cases – power outages.

The Sun is also prone to bursts of energetic particles. These particles are blocked by Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, but they could pose a threat to astronauts traveling in deep space, and they can interfere with our satellites. This clip shows an eruption of energetic particles impacting a Sun-observing satellite, creating the ‘snow’ in the image.

We keep watch on the Sun 24/7 with a fleet of satellites to monitor and better understand this activity. And this summer, we’re going one step closer with the launch of Parker Solar Probe, a mission to touch the Sun. Parker Solar Probe will get far closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft has ever gone – into the corona, within 4 million miles of the surface – and will send back unprecedented direct measurements from the regions thought to drive much of the Sun’s activity. More information about the fundamental processes there can help round out and improve models to predict the space weather that the Sun sends our way.

Keep up with the latest on the Sun at @NASASun on Twitter, and follow along with Parker Solar Probe’s last steps to launch at nasa.gov/solarprobe.

The stretchiness that allows living tissues to expand, contract, stretch, and bend throughout a lifetime is the result of a protein molecule called tropoelastin. Remarkably, this molecule can be stretched to eight times its length and always returns back to its original size.

Now, for the first time, researchers have decoded the molecular structure of this complex molecule, as well as the details of what can go wrong with its structure in various genetically driven diseases.

Tropoelastin is the precursor molecule of elastin, which along with structures called microfibrils is the key to flexibility of tissues including skin, lungs, and blood vessels. But the molecule is complex, made up of 698 amino acids in sequence and filled with disordered regions, so unravelling its structure has been a major challenge for science.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) program recreated the periodic table of elements in just a few hours.

It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form.

Called Atom2Vec, the program successfully learned to distinguish between different atoms after analyzing a list of chemical compound names from an online database. The unsupervised AI then used concepts borrowed from the field of natural language processing—in particular, the idea that the properties of words can be understood by looking at other words surrounding them—to cluster the elements according to their chemical properties.

“We wanted to know whether an AI can be smart enough to discover the periodic table on its own, and our team showed that it can,” says study leader Shoucheng Zhang, a professor of physics at Stanford University.

How strong is an octopus? How many suction cups does an octopus have? And can octopus give you hickeys? 

Dive into the wonderful world of octopus natural history with cephalopod aquarist Candace and learn more about giant Pacific octopuses at the Monterey Bay Aquarium!

From shellfish-eating caimans to giants twice the length of a car, the area was once a hotspot for crocodiles.

Gifs Show How Mushrooms Grow

More information: Adrian Patrut et al. The demise of the largest and oldest African baobabs, Nature Plants (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41477-018-0170-5

The view on Easter Island

President Trump may have promised to “get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us,” but it seems as though his administration’s policies will only make matters worse.

A new opinion piece, written by two Harvard researchers in a leading medical journal, has calculated that the Trump administration’s environmental agenda could result in 80,000 more deaths and lead to respiratory problems for more than 1 million people every decade.