Mapping The Sky.

One million miles from home.

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1. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope has released its first test images. These pictures of sparkling stars and galaxies show that the new space telescope is beginning its daunting task of mapping a huge portion of the sky. Euclid launched July 1 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It has arrived at its destination about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, a vantage point known as the Second Lagrange Point (L2). While it sailed to its destination, researchers on Earth were hard at work turning on and calibrating its two cameras. The telescope’s first images show that both cameras are working as expected, peering into the universe in both visible and infrared light. These images show an area of the sky about one-quarter the area of the full moon, but over the course of its six-year mission Euclid is expected to observe an area about 300,000 times larger, covering about a third of the entire sky. (Sources: jpl.nasa.gov, newscientist.com)

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One of Euclid’s calibration images, this one in the visible spectrum (Source: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA

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2. Quest Diagnostics on Monday launched the first direct-to-consumer blood test to detect abnormal levels of beta amyloid, a key Alzheimer's disease protein that can appear years before dementia symptoms arise. The $399 test, called AD-Detect, uses the same technology as a blood test the company began selling for use by doctors in early 2022. "One of the advantages of having an amyloid test is that it lets you know, potentially years in advance of even being symptomatic, that you are at risk for Alzheimer's," said Dr. Michael Racke, Quest's medical director of neurology. Quest's consumer test is aimed at adults aged 18 and older who may have mild memory loss or a family history of Alzheimer's and want to understand their own risk for the disease, Racke said. (Source: reuters.com, questhealth.com)