From Seed To Market: How NASA Brings Food To The Table

Happy New Year From NASA! The year 2021 was one for the books, so what will 2022 bring? No matter what, remember: You are made of star stuff. Sparkly, glorious star stuff.

What's this image? Click here. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Sarajedini Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Why is the final phase so difficult?Sorry if I sound dumb,I'm just curious.Also,what will be the rover's first task after landing?

why are cheetahs not technically big cats? is it just because they're weird as hell or do they not meet some big cat criteria?

so the thing about Big Cats is that they’re all closely related members of the genus Panthera! 

because they’re all part of the same lineage, they share a lot of traits like the ability to roar.

and cheetahs are actually members of a completely different cat lineage altogether, the genus Acinonyx!

they’re not very closely related to the big cats at all and are actually most closely related to Pumas, which you can totally see if you stack them up next to each other and squint really hard. 

it’s okay though, the cheetah can still be the biggest cat in our hearts :’)

Our universe is FULL of strange and surprising things.

And luckily, our Hubble Space Telescope is there to be our window to the unimaginable! Hubble recently ran into an issue with its payload computer which controls and coordinates science instruments onboard the spacecraft. On July 16, teams successfully switched to backup hardware to compensate for the problem! A day later, the telescope resumed normal science operations. To celebrate, we’re taking you back to 2016 when our dear Hubble captured perhaps one of the most intriguing objects in our Milky Way galaxy: a massive star trapped inside a bubble! The star inside this Bubble Nebula burns a million times brighter than our Sun and produces powerful gaseous outflows that howl at more than four million miles per hour. Based on the rate the star is expending energy, scientists estimate in 10 to 20 million years it will explode as a supernova. And the bubble will succumb to a common fate: It’ll pop.

Is that even possible??

Got a question about black holes? Let’s get to the bottom of these odd phenomena. Ask our black hole expert anything! 

Black holes are mystifying yet terrifying cosmic phenomena. Unfortunately, people have a lot of ideas about them that are more science fiction than science. Don’t worry! Our black hole expert, Jeremy Schnittman, will be answering your your questions in an Answer Time session on Wednesday, October 2 from 3pm - 4 pm ET here on NASA’s Tumblr! Make sure to ask your question now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask!

Jeremy joined the Astrophysics Science Division at our Goddard Space Flight Center in 2010 following postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include theoretical and computational modeling of black hole accretion flows, X-ray polarimetry, black hole binaries, gravitational wave sources, gravitational microlensing, dark matter annihilation, planetary dynamics, resonance dynamics and exoplanet atmospheres. He has been described as a “general-purpose astrophysics theorist,” which he regards as quite a compliment. 

Fun Fact: The computer code Jeremy used to make the black hole animations we featured last week is called “Pandurata,” after a species of black orchid from Sumatra. The name pays homage to the laser fusion lab at the University of Rochester where Jeremy worked as a high school student and wrote his first computer code, “Buttercup.” All the simulation codes at the lab are named after flowers.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

I hope you will enjoy this Halloween special. Today, we are trying something a little bit different by exploring the evolution of a particular animal : Bats.

While their evolutionary history is shrouded in mystery, they allow us, nonetheless, to explore 2 interesting ideas :

1- Convergent evolution : How organisms tend to evolve similar (albeit not identical) body plans as solutions to similar problems (flight in birds, bats and pterosaurs)

2- Prediction : Like any theory, evolution is not only descriptive, but also predictive. Thanks to its models and principles, it allows us to make predictions to complement our gap in observational data.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. : The blog in the third picture is neither scientific nor peer-reviewed. But it is a nice illustration of how the common ancestor of bats MIGHT have looked like, and how using basic principles from evolution, phylogeny, and comparative anatomy, we can visualize how some animals have come to be what they are.

Why did I think anyone would like this?