In 2014, amateur astronomers in New Zealand glimpsed a flare of light emanating from the constellation of Centauri. NASA later confirmed this blaze was a massive supernova explosion from another galaxy an incredible 57 million light-years away from our Milky Way. “Dedicated amateur astronomers often make intriguing discoveries – particularly of fleeting astronomical phenomena such
Month: December 2021
Until recently, one of the biggest myths in science was that all dinosaurs have been extinct for the past 65 million years. But thanks to new fossil discoveries that filled in our knowledge about avian dinosaurs, we now know that only some dinosaurs went extinct following an asteroid collision with Earth – others survived and gave
The pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi is the largest known flying animal to have ever existed, living on Earth more than 67 million years ago. Now new research on the creature and its newly discovered smaller relative, Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni, gives us a better idea of how Q. northropi flew and got airborne to begin with. Our knowledge of Q. northropi
Recently, scientists in Hornsund, Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic ocean – witnessed a polar bear pursuing a reindeer into the sea before killing it, dragging it ashore, and eating it. The video that they captured was widely shared on news and social media platforms. Then, two days later, they saw the same
After a detailed analysis of where the James Webb Space Telescope is now (29 December 2021) and how it got there, NASA determined the observatory should have enough propellant to operate in space for significantly more than 10 years in space. Webb’s mission lifetime was designed to be at least 5-1/2 years, and mission engineers
We’re so far down the road of climate change, that even making drastic cuts to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels won’t be enough for the world’s weather systems to fall back into their previous patterns, according to a new study. But the research also suggests we still can have a huge impact on how severe that
It might not look like much, but here is the first monumental image from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Earlier this month, a circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera was opened, allowing the camera to take its first image. Now, imagine what the camera’s last image will be like: a REALLY closeup
Astronomers have captured a breathtaking radio wave image, showing our closest radio active black hole spewing out massive jets of plasma that span more than 16 times the size of the full moon in our sky. The supermassive black hole in question is located in the center of the galaxy Centaurus A around 12 million
Researchers have imagined a lightweight, flying saucer-style rover that can float across the surface of the Moon and other airless planetary surfaces such as asteroids. The ‘flying saucer’ would be powered by the electric field that builds up due to direct exposure to the Sun and its surrounding plasma. In the absence of an atmosphere, this
Beijing on Tuesday accused the United States of irresponsible and unsafe conduct in space over two “close encounters” between the Chinese space station and satellites operated by Elon Musk‘s SpaceX. Tiangong, China’s new space station, had to maneuver to avoid colliding with one Starlink satellite in July and with another in October, according to a
The mummy of ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep I was so exquisitely wrapped – decorated with flower garlands and buried with a lifelike face mask – scientists have been hesitant to open up the remains. That is, until now. Some 3,000 years after Amenhotep’s burial, a team of researchers used CT scans to digitally unwrap his body for the first time,
A summary of decades of research on a rather ‘out-there’ idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It’s easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then papers
Finding the right work-life balance is by no means a new issue in our society. But the tension between the two has been heightened by the pandemic, with workers increasingly dwelling over the nature of their work, its meaning and purpose, and how these affect their quality of life. Studies suggest people are leaving or
We sort of take for granted the depictions of prehistoric beasties illustrated in the books of our childhood. But piecing together Earth’s murky past is a lot harder than it sounds. Scientists have to rely on fragmentary bones, weathered footprints, impressions in rock – these don’t always capture the fine details of the complex, living,
On the grand cosmic scale, our little corner of the Universe isn’t all that special – this idea lies at the heart of the Copernican principle. Yet there’s one major aspect about our planet that’s peculiar indeed: Our Sun is a yellow dwarf. Because our home star is what we know most intimately, it would
Every year, Hubble takes a little time to turn its electronic eyes closer to home. Rather than staring into vast distances across space and time, it focuses on our very own Solar System; specifically, the heavyweight planets that lurk out past the asteroid belt – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. That’s not because they’re pretty;
Psychologists call it the dark triad: an intersection of three of the most malevolent tendencies of human nature – psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. But the truth goes deeper, and darker. There’s also egoism, sadism, spitefulness, and more. And behind this rogues gallery of all our worst inclinations on the surface, a central, common core of
It’s a question that has puzzled observers for centuries: do the fantastic green and crimson light displays of the aurora borealis produce any discernible sound? Conjured by the interaction of solar particles with gas molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, the aurora generally occurs near Earth’s poles, where the magnetic field is strongest. Reports of the aurora
Every geography schoolbook has them: maps that look like today’s Earth, but not quite, since all continents are merged into a single supercontinent. Those maps were used to explain why dinosaurs in South America and Africa, or North America and Europe looked so alike. Paleogeographic reconstructions like these provide context to study the processes that
The world’s most powerful space telescope on Saturday blasted off into orbit, headed to an outpost 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) from Earth, after several delays caused by technical hitches. The James Webb Space Telescope, some three decades and billions of dollars in the making, left Earth enclosed in its Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou
The forthcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope offers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers. It’s also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us. Astronomers rarely use their telescopes to simply take pictures. The pictures in astrophysics are usually generated by a process of scientific inference and imagination,
A new type of weather condition has been observed, existing primarily in one particular part of the world: compact, slow-moving, moisture-rich pools. Researchers are calling these ‘atmospheric lakes’. This unique type of storm occurs over the western Indian Ocean and moves towards Africa. Unlike most storms – created by a vortex – the lakes are
Since early this year, skywatchers on Earth have been tracking Comet Leonard, a kilometer-wide dirty snowball made of ice, rock, and dust. Now, as it heads towards a close encounter with the Sun on 3 January 2022, several spacecraft – with the distinct advantage of having an unobstructed front-row seat to the action – have
A sea monster that lived during the early dinosaur age is so unexpectedly colossal, it reveals that its kind grew to gigantic sizes extremely quickly, evolutionarily speaking at least. The discovery suggests that such ichthyosaurs – a group of fish-shaped marine reptiles that inhabited the dinosaur-era seas – grew to enormous sizes in a span of only 2.5 million
With an atmosphere acidic enough to strip the skin from your bones, Venus is far from what we might imagine as hospitable. But a new study backs up the idea that cocoons of life could potentially exist in the planet’s corrosive clouds. Researchers have identified a chemical pathway through which the droplets of sulfuric acid
The science community is getting a very long-awaited Christmas gift this year – the much-delayed launch of the James Webb Space Telescope! The successor to the much-loved Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, was originally scheduled to be launched in 2007. Now, 14 years later, all systems seem to finally be ready to
A new study has demonstrated crows can assign value to their tools just like we do. “Many of us will fuss about a brand-new phone, making sure it does not get scratched, dropped or lost. But we may handle an old phone with a cracked screen quite carelessly,” said behavioral ecologist Barbara Klump now at
Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory’s facilities has resulted
A nearly 6,000-year-old tomb unearthed in England holds the remains of 27 family members, representing a five-generation lineage descended from one man and four women, researchers have found using DNA analysis. The findings suggest there were polygamous marriages in the upper echelons of Neolithic society at that time, because the researchers think it was unlikely that the
It turns out there are still exciting new discoveries to be made in a field as well-studied as human anatomy: researchers have confirmed the existence of a layer of muscle in the human jaw that has until now eluded anatomists. This new muscle is a deeper, third section of the masseter muscle. It’s the most prominent jaw
Seconds count when it comes to tsunami alerts, and scientists may have found a warning sign that can be detected even earlier than sea level rises: the magnetic fields created by these gigantic rushes of waves. Even though the difference might only be a minute or two, that can save lives. Magnetic field data could
From world politics to top-ranking businesses, to the upper rungs of academia and even Nobel laureates, men outnumber women by a significant margin. One claim to such disparity has been attributed to biology. The idea there’s some kind of ‘superdiversity’ among male brains has been repeatedly cited in the scientific literature in recent decades; but according
Bird watchers in Massachusetts have been given an early Christmas present in the form of an incredibly rare sighting – a Steller’s sea eagle, which is native to Asia almost 8,000 km (5,000 miles) away. The large sea eagles are native to the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia, and also seen in Japan, China,
If creepy crawlies make you uncomfortable, be glad you weren’t living in the Carboniferous period (around 100 million years before the dinosaurs arrived) in what is now Northumberland in the UK. Scientists have made an astonishing discovery along this part of the coast of northeast England: a 326 million-year-old fossil, showing traces of the largest
A rare and exquisitely preserved dinosaur embryo tucked inside an egg like a baby bird has been unearthed in southern China, providing an “unprecedented glimpse” into dinosaur development. With a posture that resembles modern bird embryos close to hatching, the fossilized embryo is a remarkable find which raises the possibility that evolutionary links between modern
When the immense sound of the Ariane 5 rocket rumbles across Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana, it will signal the end of a journey decades in the making. Perched atop the rocket will be the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most sophisticated and complex observatory ever constructed. An enormous mirror 6.5 meters across, consisting
Deep under the ice of Antarctica’s Ekström Ice Shelf there is nothing but complete darkness. Well, complete darkness and a thriving ecosystem that’s existed for thousands of years, according to a new paper by researchers from the UK and Germany. “This discovery of so much life living in these extreme conditions is a complete surprise
It’s been over a year since the Hayabusa2 probe delivered its precious cargo of dust from an alien space rock, and we’re finally getting a more detailed glimpse of what makes up asteroid Ryugu. In two papers published today, international teams of scientists have revealed that, in accordance with analyses conducted by the probe while
You may have experienced an unsettling amount of swaying and wobbling if you’ve been on a bridge with large numbers of pedestrians traveling over it at the same time. Now, we have a fascinating new explanation for what causes this worrying movement in the structure. Until now, the thinking went as follows: people fall into
A team of physicists claims to have entangled a superconducting qubit and a tardigrade, moving the freezing, tiny, and well-controlled world of quantum into the “hot and wet” systems of life. However, the results described in this preprint paper are not quite so cut and dried, and many quantum researchers are arguing that the poor
In another context, Jupiter‘s moon Ganymede might have been a planet. As the largest moon in our Solar System, it’s one of the most intriguing locations in the neighborhood. Which is great, because it just so happens that Jupiter probe Juno is in the vicinity. Now, it’s sent back some curious noises. On 7 June 2021,
Famed for their swift longboats and bloody incursions, Vikings have long been associated with brutal, over-the-top violence. Between the eighth and 11th centuries, these groups left their Nordic homelands to make their fortunes by trading and raiding across Europe. Particularly infamous is the so-called “blood eagle”, a gory ritual these warriors are said to have
Billions of birds die each year from collisions with tall glass buildings, communication towers and power lines – a gobsmacking toll that’s expected to increase as cities grow outwards and upwards. A recent study suggests there could be a way to fix our deadly mistakes – by installing ‘acoustic lighthouses’ that blast white noise in
The much-delayed launch of the James Webb space telescope will go ahead on December 24, NASA and the company overseeing the launch confirmed on Saturday. The project, begun in 1989, was originally expected to deploy the instrument – which will be the largest and most powerful telescope ever to be launched into space – in the early
The picturesque and remote Faroe Islands sit in the North Atlantic, between Norway and Iceland, around 200 miles (322 kilometers) northwest of Scotland. Today, almost 54,000 people live on the archipelago, but it seems the first inhabitants arrived a lot earlier than previously thought. From the earliest archaeological structures on the Faroes, we know that
Spiraling fractal branches draw connections between a staggering 2.2 million living species on Earth in the most comprehensive tree of life ever created. “It allows people to find their favorite living things, be they golden moles or giant sequoias, and see how evolutionary history connects them together to create a giant tree of all life
If you want to be dazzled by a spectacular northern lights display, your best bet is to skywatch near the North Pole. But that wasn’t the case 41,000 years ago, when a disruption of Earth’s magnetic field sent auroras wandering toward the equator. During this geomagnetic disturbance, known as the Laschamp event or the Laschamp excursion, the
When we want to really connect with others, we usually limit ourselves to family and close friends. Opening up to a stranger would likely seem a daunting prospect to most of us – but it looks like our expectations may not always match reality. New research suggests that people’s expectations about their interactions with strangers are