Farewell, Enceladus.  Photographs From Cassini’s Last Close Flyby Of This Spectacular Moon.

So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars 

I hate to be the materialistic weasel of the group, but do you think we’ll get hazard pay out of this?

Rockhound, Armageddon (1998)

Stormy seas in Sagittarius

“I could do so much more.”

Congratulations to Project Mars First Place poster winner, Adrianna Allen from Lapeer, Michigan.

Visit http://projectmarscompetition.com to see the Film and Poster winners and finalists.

I can’t wait till I have grandchildren. “When I was younger, I had to walk to the rim of a crater. Uphill! In an EVA suit! on Mars, ya little shit! You hear me? Mars!

Mark Watney (via themartianquotes)

Good God...

The launch of Discovery, with the Columbia prepping for the next mission.  One of the rare times both launchpads were occupied at the same time.

Aggression causes new nerve cells to be generated in the brain

A group of neurobiologists from Russia and the USA, including Dmitry Smagin, Tatyana Michurina, and Grigori Enikolopov from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), have proven experimentally that aggression has an influence on the production of new nerve cells in the brain. The scientists conducted a series of experiments on male mice and published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Researchers from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ICG SB RAS), MIPT, Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, and Stony Brook University and School of Medicine studied the changes that occurred in the brains of mice demonstrating aggressive behaviour, which attacked other mice and won in fights. After a win, these mice became even more aggressive, and new neurons appeared in their hippocampus - one of the key structures of the brain; in addition to this, in mice that were allowed to continue fighting certain changes were observed in the activity of their nerve cells.

Dmitry A. Smagin, June-Hee Park, Tatyana V. Michurina, Natalia Peunova, Zachary Glass, Kasim Sayed, Natalya P. Bondar, Irina N. Kovalenko, Natalia N. Kudryavtseva, Grigori Enikolopov. Altered Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Amygdalar Neuronal Activity in Adult Mice with Repeated Experience of Aggression. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2015; 9 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2015.00443

Mouse hippocampal neurons labeled with GFP. Imaged with a 20X objective on Zeiss 710, Dr. Fu-Ming Zhou