With a trio of smaller satellites that can each detect 26 wavelengths of light and thermal energy, the Landsat Next mission is expected to look very different from its predecessors that have been observing Earth for 50 years. This new plan for Landsat Next, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is designed to provide more frequent, and finer resolution, data of the changing surface of Earth.

“I think this is going to be a phenomenally capable instrument, with the biggest leap in Landsat capability since Landsat 4,” said Bruce Cook, NASA Landsat Next Project Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is basically the first chance we’ve had to completely re-conceive the Landsat mission.”

The Landsat series of satellites h...

Wi-Fi routers continuously broadcast radio frequencies that your phones, tablets and computers pick up and use to get you online. As the invisible frequencies travel, they bounce off or pass through everything around them—the walls, the furniture and even you. Your movements, even breathing, slightly alter the signal’s path from the router to your device.

Those interactions don’t interrupt your internet connection, but they could signal when someone is in trouble...

Astronomers say they have solved an outstanding problem that challenged our understanding of how the universe evolved—the spatial distribution of faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

These satellite galaxies exhibit a bizarre alignment—they seem to lie on an enormous thin rotating plane—called the “plane of satellites.”

This seemingly unlikely arrangement had puzzled astronomers for over 50 years, leading many to...

A probiotic bacterium called Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus HA-114 prevents neurodegeneration in the C. elegans worm, an animal model used to study amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). That’s the finding of a new study at Canada’s CHUM Research Centre (CRCHUM) led by Université de Montréal neuroscience professor Alex Parker and published in the journal Communications Biology.

He and his team suggest that the disruption of lipid metabolism contributes to this cerebral degeneration, and show that the neuroprotection provided by HA-114, a non-commercial probiotic, is unique compared to other strains of the same bacterial family tested.

“When we add it to the diet of our animal model, we notice that it suppresses the progression of motor neuron degenera...