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Vampires

What flying creature can hop, leap, and turn somersaults? Another hint: it can fit in the palm of your hand and weighs about the same as a penny. One more hint: its entire diet is blood. Desmodus rotundus, the vampire bat, packs a lot of punch into its 3-inch body. Using special 'thumbs' on its wings, it can push off into the air to perform ...

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Vampires
Mathematics

Origins Of The Meter

The origins of the meter go back to at least the 18th century. At that time, there were two competing approaches to the definition of a standard unit of length. Some suggested defining the meter as ... Continue reading

OriginsOfTheMeter
Medicine

Protozoa That Cause Disease

Diseases caused by protozoan parasites are among the leading causes of death and disease in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Developing countries within these areas contain ... Continue reading

ProtozoaThatCauseDisease
Science

The Wright Sister

When you think of airplanes, you may think of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Their early experiments led to the first manned airplane flight 100 years ago. There's another member of the Wright family, ... Continue reading

TheWrightSister
Astronomy

Jumping Starlight

'Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are,' says the song by Jane Taylor. But stars don’t really twinkle; their light reaches the earth in a steady way. Why then do we see them ... Continue reading

JumpingStarlight

The Minor Planets

MinorPlanetsAsteroids are rocky fragments left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of these fragments of ancient space rubble - sometimes referred to by scientists as minor planets - can be found orbiting the Sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. This region in our solar system, called the Asteroid Belt or Main Belt, probably contains millions of asteroids ranging widely in size from Ceres, which at 940 km in diameter is about one-quarter the diameter of our Moon, to bodies that are less than 1 km across. There are more than 20,000 numbered asteroids.

As asteroids revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits, giant Jupiter's gravity and occasional close encounters with Mars or with another asteroid change the asteroids' orbits, knocking them out of the Main Belt and hurling them into space across the orbits of the planets. For example, Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos may be captured asteroids. Scientists believe that stray asteroids or fragments of asteroids have slammed into Earth in the past, playing a major role both in altering the geological history of our planet and in the evolution of life on it. The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has been linked to a devastating impact near the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

NASA's Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission was the first dedicated scientific mission to an asteroid. The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft caught up with asteroid Eros in February 2000 and orbited the small body for a year, studying its surface, orbit, mass, composition, and magnetic field. In February 2001, mission controllers guided the spacecraft to the first-ever landing on an asteroid.