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Snoozing jellyfish have confirmed that a brain is not necessary for sleep. Scientists made the discovery after observing a primitive jellyfish called Cassiopea that lives upside down on the sea floor and lacks any kind of central nervous system. The creatures, which resemble miniature cauliflower heads, have bodies that pulse with a steady rhythm. Videos of the jellyfish taken over 24 hours showed that they pulsed less frequently at night, but they could be “woken up” by dropping a little food into the tanks where they were kept. “It’s the first example of sleep in animals without a brain,” said US researcher Professor Paul Sternberg from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He compared the effect of the food to that of smelling coffee in the morning. A second sign of sleep was seen when the jellyfish were physically disturbed during their low-activity periods, forcing them to float in open water. At night it took them three times longer to ...

While the people of the United States were busy observing the first Total Solar Eclipse in 99 years yesterday (August 21), NASA photographer Joel Kowsky, while looking up from Banner (Wyoming), observed something else. He soon managed to capture a silhouette of the ISS passing in front of the sun at the time of the eclipse. With six crew members on board, the ISS transits the sun at roughly five miles a second during the eclipse. NASA also cleared doubts of people asking whether the visual was of a Sunspot instead, and posted a seven frame composition of the station showing its movement. NASA then tweeted out a composite picture of the photobombing and also uploaded a video of the same on its website.