During this skip entry, Orion will dip into the upper part of Earth’s atmosphere and use that atmosphere, along with the lift of the capsule, to skip back out of the atmosphere, then reenter for final descent under parachutes and splashdown. It’s a little like skipping a rock across the water in a river or lake. “The skip entry will help Orion land closer to the coast of the United States, where recovery crews will be waiting to bring the spacecraft back to land,” said Chris Madsen, Orion guidance, navigation and control subsystem manager....

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has detected propylene, a chemical used to make food-storage containers, car bumpers and other consumer products, on Saturn’s moon Titan. This is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than Earth. The small amount of propylene was identified in Titan’s lower atmosphere by Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). This instrument measures the infrared light, or heat radiation, emitted from Saturn and its moons in much the same way our hands feel the warmth of a fire....

Superbubbles are found in regions where massive stars have formed in the last few million years. The massive stars produce intense radiation, expel matter at high speeds, and race through their evolution to explode as supernovas. The winds and supernova shock waves carve out huge cavities called superbubbles in the surrounding gas. X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in pink and optical data from the Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (MCELS) are colored in red, green and blue....

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill. “This temporary increase in methane — sharply up and then back down — tells us there must be some relatively localized source,” said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team....

The image shows the northeastern rim of Urvara Crater on Ceres at lower left. To the right of the crater, the long, narrow feature that appears to jut out toward the north is called Pongal Catena, which is about 60 miles (96 km) long. Catenae are large grooves or troughs that can have various origins. They refer to chains of closely connected craters formed by a series of impacts, as found on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede....

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, or Galex, was placed in standby mode today as engineers prepare to end mission operations, nearly nine years after the telescope’s launch. The spacecraft is scheduled to be decommissioned — taken out of service — later this year. The mission extensively mapped large portions of the sky with sharp ultraviolet vision, cataloging millions of galaxies spanning 10 billion years of cosmic time. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer launched into space from a Pegasus XL rocket in April 2003....

IXPE is the first satellite dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from a variety of cosmic sources, such as black holes and neutron stars. Polarization is a property of light that gives scientists important information about cosmic objects. Before IXPE, X-ray polarization was rarely measured in space. In just one year, IXPE has conducted measurements no telescope has ever been able to make before. Here’s a look at some of IXPE’s accomplishments in its first year of operation:...

After 16 years in space, NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has made its last observation. The satellite provided unprecedented views into the extreme environments around white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. RXTE sent data from its last science observation to the ground early on January 4. After performing engineering tests, controllers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., successfully decommissioned the satellite on January 5. RXTE far exceeded its original science goals and leaves astronomers with a scientific bounty for years to come....

Much the way ships form bow waves as they move through water, CMEs set off interplanetary shocks when they erupt from the Sun at extreme speeds, propelling a wave of high-energy particles. These particles can spark space weather events around Earth, endangering spacecraft and astronauts. Understanding a shock’s structure — particularly how it develops and accelerates — is key to predicting how it might disrupt near-Earth space. But without a vast array of sensors scattered through space, these things are impossible to measure directly....

Cygnus is scheduled to arrive at the space station around 6:10 a.m. Thursday, August 12. NASA Television, the NASA app, and agency’s website will provide live coverage of the spacecraft’s approach and arrival beginning at 4:45 a.m. NASA astronaut Megan McArthur will use the space station’s robotic Canadarm2 to capture Cygnus upon its arrival, while ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet monitors telemetry during rendezvous, capture, and installation on the Earth-facing port of the Unity module....

The Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) for future flights of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket has passed its Critical Design Review, or CDR. A panel of experts evaluated the EUS in the latest review to determine that the stage’s design meets requirements for future missions. This most recent assessment certifies the EUS meets critical design requirements to withstand deep space environments and when completed will ensure astronaut safety. The review board also evaluated testing processes, the ability of the industrial base to supply parts and tooling, and production plans....

Vaginal birth triggers the expression of a protein in the brains of newborns that improves brain development and function in adulthood, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers, who also found that this protein expression is impaired in the brains of offspring delivered by cesarean section (C-sections). These findings are published in the August issue of PLoS ONE by a team of researchers led by Tamas Horvath, the Jean and David W....

In nature, bacteria use CRISPR as an adaptive immune system to protect themselves against viruses. Over the past decade, scientists have been able to successfully build upon that natural phenomenon with the discovery of CRISPR proteins found in bacteria — the most widely used of which is the Cas9 enzyme. In combination with a guide RNA, Cas9 is able to target, cut, and degrade specific DNA sequences. With applications ranging from the treatment of genetic diseases to the nutritional potency of agricultural crops, CRISPR has emerged as one of the most promising tools for genome editing....

They also identified a genetic “switch” that can slow down memory generalization — the loss of specific details over time that occurs in both age-related memory impairment and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which emotions originally produced by traumatic experiences are elicited in response to innocuous cues that have little resemblance to the traumatic memory. “The circuit mechanism we identified in mice allows us to preserve the precision or the details of memories over the passage of time in adult as well as aged animals,” says Amar Sahay of the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine and HSCI, corresponding author of a paper appearing in Nature Medicine....

Despite the substantial difference in scale between the two networks (more than 27 orders of magnitude), their quantitative analysis, which sits at the crossroads of cosmology and neurosurgery, suggests that diverse physical processes can build structures characterized by similar levels of complexity and self-organization. The human brain functions thanks to its wide neuronal network that is deemed to contain approximately 69 billion neurons. On the other hand, the observable universe can count upon a cosmic web of at least 100 billion galaxies....

“Besides allowing us to perceive our surroundings, eye movements are also a window into our mind. They reveal who we are, how we feel, and what we do,” explains Andreas Bulling, who leads the perceptual User Interfaces research group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the Cluster of Excellence at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. Humans can read the social signals sent by the eyes as a matter of course and without being aware of doing so....

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a way to better harness the volume of energy collected by solar panels. In a new study, the researchers developed an algorithm that increases the efficiency of the solar photovoltaic (PV) system and reduces the volume of power currently being wasted due to a lack of effective controls. “We’ve developed an algorithm to further boost the power extracted from an existing solar panel,” said Milad Farsi, a Ph....

However, research has shown that the seeds of Alzheimer’s disease are planted years — even decades — earlier, long before the cognitive impairments surface that make a diagnosis possible. Those seeds are amyloid beta proteins that misfold and clump together, forming small aggregates called oligomers. Over time, through a process scientists are still trying to understand, those “toxic” oligomers of amyloid beta are thought to develop into Alzheimer’s. A new laboratory test that can measure levels of amyloid beta oligomers in blood samples has been developed by a team led by researchers at the University of Washington (UW)....

Researchers at MIT have now shown that they can use a new type of measurement to predict how drugs will affect cancer cells taken from multiple-myeloma patients. Furthermore, they showed that their predictions correlated with how those patients actually fared when treated with those drugs. This type of testing could help doctors predict drug responses based on measurements of cancer cell growth rates after drug exposure, says Scott Manalis, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the MIT departments of Biological Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research....

This pair of images shows effects of one Martian day of wind blowing sand underneath NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover on a non-driving day for the rover. Each image was taken just after sundown by the rover’s downward-looking Mars Descent Imager (MARDI). The area of ground shown in the images spans about 3 feet (about 1 meter) left-to-right. The first image was taken on January 23, 2017, during the 1,587th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars....