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Space & Science enthusiasts are going to witness two comets zooming past earth this month. Both the comets have similar orbits, which makes them interesting subjects for further study.

Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT) has contributed in the finding of new earth-passing comets. The 4.3-meter telescope located at Lowell Observatory identified the second comet coming towards earth.

One of the comets, dubbed Comet P/2016 BA14, was previously identified as an asteroid. PanSTARRS telescope of the University of Hawaii first spotted the comet in January this year. Astronomers thought it was an asteroid, but when University of Maryland and Lowell Observatory worked together to know more about it, they found that it’s a comet heading towards us.

A Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts left for the International Space Station (ISS) Friday. The crew members are two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut whose arrival on the space station will increase the crew number to six.

The astronauts, NASA veteran Jeff Williams, Roscosmos’ Oleg Skripochka and Aleksey Ovchinin, left the earth at 5:26 pm from Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz space capsule. The trio is expected to reach ISS after a six-hour voyage. As per NASA officials, docking time is 11:11 pm.

Undoubtedly, Pluto is among the most fascinating and interesting celestial objects. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made a flyby of Pluto last year in July and since then, it has been beaming back data and images of the dwarf planet revealing what makes Pluto beautiful, bewitching space object.

Earlier, the probe sent another batch of images of Pluto portraying the Kuiper belt object as mysterious icy world. These snapshots show that surface of the dwarf world is incredibly diverse. New Horizons team released a set of five science papers this week in the journal Science, revealing interesting information about Pluto and its moons.

A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers has suggested that a rat problem could lead to depression. As per the study, the people living in Baltimore’s low-income neighborhoods, who face rodent issues, are notably more likely to suffer from sadness or anxiety.

Study leader Danielle German, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Bloomberg School, said that nobody likes the company of rats. German added, “This study provides strong evidence that rats are an under-appreciated stressor that affects how people feel about lives in low-income neighborhoods. The good news is it’s modifiable. If we can do something to reduce number of rats in neighborhoods, we can improve people’s well-being.”

Women may remember words more than men during the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A latest study suggested that this could delay diagnosis and treatment among women who have same levels of shrinkage in brain areas related to the debilitating disease.

The areas demonstrate the earliest proof of the most common kind of dementia. In the United States, Alzheimer's disease is the 6th main cause of death in people, and an estimated two-thirds of people who contract AD are women.

Dr. Erin E. Sundermann from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said, “One way to interpret the results is that because women have better verbal memory skills than men throughout life, women have a buffer of protection against loss of verbal memory before the effects of Alzheimer's disease kick in”.

According to a new ProPublica analysis, doctors who get more money from drug and medical device makers prescribe more brand-name medications. The authors of the study have warned that the conclusion made by them after analyzing Medicare Part D prescription drug data, doesn’t suggest a direct relation between payments and doctors who chose to prescribe drugs from the particular companies making the payments.

However, they have found an apparent connection between average rates of total brand-name prescribing and getting industry money.

The practice improves the revenue of pharmaceutical companies. The trend could get stronger, when doctors receive additional industry money.