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11 TIPS TO OVERCOME NEGATIVE THOUGHTS

Are you tired of negative thoughts? Always thinking of your imperfections? Constantly thinking something will go wrong? That no one loves you? Losing your mind over criticism? Spending hours telling yourself how worthless you are and comparing your life to others?  Are you missing out on opportunities due to your pessimistic thoughts? Is your life spiraling down due to this?

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Happy 4th of July… From Space!

In Hollywood blockbusters, explosions and eruptions are often among the stars of the show. In space, explosions, eruptions and twinkling of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Spend some of your Fourth of July taking a look at these celestial phenomenon:

Credit: NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory

An Astral Exhibition

This object became a sensation in the astronomical community when a team of researchers pointed at it with our Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope in 1901, noting that it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days, before gradually fading away in brightness. Today, astronomers cite it as an example of a “classical nova,” an outburst produced by a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of a white dwarf star, the dense remnant of a Sun-like star.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope

A Twinkling Tapestry

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display. The sparkling centerpiece is a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina.

Credit: NASA/THEMIS/Sebastian Saarloos

An Illuminating Aurora

Sometimes during solar magnetic events, solar explosions hurl clouds of magnetized particles into space. Traveling more than a million miles per hour, these coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, made up of hot material called plasma take up to three days to reach Earth. Spacecraft and satellites in the path of CMEs can experience glitches as these plasma clouds pass by. In near-Earth space, magnetic reconnection incites explosions of energy driving charged solar particles to collide with atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. We see these collisions near Earth’s polar regions as the aurora. Three spacecraft from our Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission, observed these outbursts known as substorms.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope//ESA/STScI

A Shining Supermassive Merger

Every galaxy has a black hole at its center. Usually they are quiet, without gas accretions, like the one in our Milky Way. But if a star creeps too close to the black hole, the gravitational tides can rip away the star’s gaseous matter. Like water spinning around a drain, the gas swirls into a disk around the black hole at such speeds that it heats to millions of degrees. As an inner ring of gas spins into the black hole, gas particles shoot outward from the black hole’s polar regions. Like bullets shot from a rifle, they zoom through the jets at velocities close to the speed of light. Astronomers using our Hubble Space Telescope observed correlations between supermassive black holes and an event similar to tidal disruption, pictured above in the Centaurus A galaxy. 

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope/ESA

A Stellar Explosion

Supernovae can occur one of two ways. The first occurs when a white dwarf—the remains of a dead star—passes so close to a living star that its matter leaks into the white dwarf. This causes a catastrophic explosion. However most people understand supernovae as the death of a massive star. When the star runs out of fuel toward the end of its life, the gravity at its heart sucks the surrounding mass into its center. At the turn of the 19th century, the binary star system Eta Carinae was faint and undistinguished. Our Hubble Telescope captured this image of Eta Carinae, binary star system. The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life, and the event that the 19th century astronomers observed was a stellar near-death experience. Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae but stop just short of destroying their star.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

An Eye-Catching Eruption

Extremely energetic objects permeate the universe. But close to home, the Sun produces its own dazzling lightshow, producing the largest explosions in our solar system and driving powerful solar storms.. When solar activity contorts and realigns the Sun’s magnetic fields, vast amounts of energy can be driven into space. This phenomenon can create a sudden flash of light—a solar flare.The above picture features a filament eruption on the Sun, accompanied by solar flares captured by our Solar Dynamics Observatory.

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Making Memories While You Sleep

Researchers have long known that the brain produces specific rhythms during sleep, and that different parts of the brain produce different rhythms. We also know that sleep is important for memory. In a recent study published in Nature Communications, UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers bridged the gap between these two schools of research — investigating how the timing of sleeping brain rhythms may influence memory storage.

The research team was led by Eric Halgren, PhD, professor of neurosciences, psychiatry and radiology, and Rachel Mak-McCully, PhD, who was a graduate student in Halgren’s lab at the time of the study. They recorded sleeping rhythms from two regions of the brain — cortex and thalamus — in three people with epilepsy who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of their treatment.

The thalamus is a relay station for all senses except smell. This part of the brain is considered the “pacemaker” of the sleep spindle, intermittent clusters of brain waves that group cortical activity and strengthen the connections between cortical neurons that form memories. The cortex is where memories are stored permanently, and it’s known to generate slow waves during sleep.

The researchers found how the cortex and thalamus work together to time slow waves and spindles in a sequence that may optimize memory formation.

“During sleep, we usually think of the thalamus as having one conversation while the cortex is having another,” Mak-McCully said. “But what we found is they are actually having a discussion that’s important for memory retention.”

The information the team collected on rhythm timing and coordination between these two areas is important because it allows them to begin thinking about how altering those rhythms could change memory storage. The ultimate goal, Mak-McCully said, is to find ways to manipulate these sleeping brain rhythms as a means to improve, or at least maintain, memory as we age.

“It’s not just that we need more of these rhythms, we need to know when they do what they do, and for how long,” she said.

Pictured: Cartoon of the communication loop described in this study: 1) downstates in the cortex lead to 2) downstates in the thalamus, which produces a spindle that 3) is sent back to the cortex.

15+ Things We Wish People Understood About Anxiety

It is utterly exhausting living in a near constant state of fight or flight for so long.

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Can we teach computers how to smell?

Researchers from IBM and Rockefeller University are trying to sniff out the answer. Smell may be the least understood of the five senses, so the team trained software to identify scents in order to learn more about how our brains perceive them. Their results prove for the first time that a scent can be predicted based on its molecular structure. Ultimately, as their database of scents grows, the predictions will become even more on the nose.

Learn how they did it →