Wired: Enjoy all those fiery red images of Saturn from NASA’s Cassini orbiter? You can thank Carolyn Porco, the planetary scientist who made its moons into stars -- web stars, that is.Porco is the leader of the imaging team for NASA’s Cassini orbiter, which is currently circling Saturn in what may be the last multibillion-dollar planetary mission for a long time. (Yeah, budget cuts -- get used to way smaller missions with lots of reusable parts.)
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.