In 1937, legendary aerial photographer and cartographer Bradford Washburn abandoned hundreds of pounds of camera gear, surveying equipment, and supplies when he ran into bad weather while exploring Canada’s frigid Yukon region. In August, 85 years later, a team of scientists and professional mountain explorers discovered the long-lost historic cache of gear buried in the
Month: October 2022
Astronomers peering into the twilight sky have found three previously unknown near-Earth asteroids. One of which is the largest potentially hazardous asteroid discovered in eight years. It measures roughly 1.5 kilometers (nearly 1 mile) across, and is on an orbit that may, in the future, bring it close enough to Earth to pose a problem.
Marking the passage of time in a world of ticking clocks and swinging pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Down at the quantum scale of buzzing electrons, however, ‘then’ can’t always be anticipated. Worse still, ‘now’ often blurs into a haze of uncertainty. A stopwatch simply isn’t going
A snail preserved in amber with an intact fringe of tiny delicate bristles along its shell is helping biologists better understand why one of the world’s slimiest animals might evolve such a groovin’ hairstyle. This unusual mollusk fossil, found in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, has lines of stiff, miniscule hairs, each between 150 and
You’ll no doubt be familiar with the dry, dusty appearance of Mars as it looks today – but scientists have found evidence of a vast ocean existing on the surface of the red planet around 3.5 billion years ago, likely covering hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. That evidence comes in the form of distinctive
Ceramics, human burial grounds, and bullets from Spanish guns are among artifacts that have been uncovered by archaeologists in Guatemala at the site of the last Maya city to resist European conquest, officials said Friday. The new excavation project began last June in an effort to understand more about the Tayasal outpost where Maya inhabitants
After collapsing into pieces in December 2020, the mighty Arecibo Observatory has a final parting gift for humanity – and it’s a doozy. Using data collected by Arecibo between December 2017 and December 2019, scientists have released the largest radar-based report on near-Earth asteroids ever published. The report, published September 22 in The Planetary Science
The European Space Agency (ESA) this week released 5 minutes of haunting, crackling audio – revealing what Earth’s magnetic field sounds like. Earth’s internal magnetism, called the magnetosphere, generates a comet-shaped field around the surface of the planet that provides protection from harmful solar and cosmic particle radiation, as well as erosion of the atmosphere
Sprawling across a remote swath of the Namib Desert, rugged grasses eke out a living from the region’s meager rainfall. The growth of so much grass in such a harsh environment is impressive, but also mysterious. The grassland is dotted by millions of strange circles, each devoid of grass or other vegetation, that together form
Despite being around for more than 100 years, Ouija boards (a wooden board covered with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the words “yes”, “no” and “goodbye”) continue to be a popular activity – especially around Halloween. To work, all participants must place their hands on the wooden pointer (or planchette) and
Long after its ancestors deleted their genetic code for a tough coat of armor, a seafaring octopus has reinvented a recipe for making a shell. A recent genetic analysis of the paper nautilus or greater argonaut (Argonauta argo) has revealed a surprising origin for its protective casing, one that doesn’t resemble the shell of its
Rumbles detected deep inside Mars have promoted speculations over volcanic activity on the red planet from “possible” to “likely”. After studying a cluster of marsquakes detected by NASA’s InSight lander, researchers have concluded that molten magma is probably still present beneath the crust of Mars – meaning that the surface of Mars continues to be
It’s a classic nightmare. You think you’re having a cheeky, sneaky pick-and-flick (or lick, although you probably shouldn’t), only to find you’ve been caught on hidden camera, knuckle-deep up your own nostril. In this case, though, the nose-picker is an aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis), a primate so adept at discretion that this is the first time
A new report from a coalition of international scientists is unequivocal about the severity of the environmental crisis that we’re in, with 16 out of the 35 ‘vital signs’ used to track climate change now rated as code red – that is, they’re at record extremes. The number of climate-related disasters is escalating, the report
Sometimes an unexpected smile is all it takes to turn your day around. Well, that kind of cheery surprise doesn’t get much bigger than this. Astronomers at NASA have spotted the Sun beaming a remarkable, joyous grin, in a sunny spectacle destined to put a smile on your dial. As shared on NASA’s Sun Twitter
Paul Henry Nargeolet has dived down to the Titanic shipwreck more often than most. More than 30 times in total, in fact. On one of those trips, in 1998, he recorded a mysterious sonar ‘blip’ close to the wreck site. In the decades since, no one has been able to establish what the blip is,
A meteor crashed into Mars on Christmas Eve 2021, and shook the planet so much that NASA’s InSight lander recorded the rumblings. Scientists didn’t know where the quake came from until NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft circling the red planet, captured images of the new impact crater. NASA revealed the discovery on Thursday. “It
Commonly assumed to be silent, 53 animals have had their ‘voices’ added to a family tree of vocalizations in an effort to determine when acoustic communication emerged in evolutionary history. The species that are finally being heard come from four different animal clades, including 50 turtle species, the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa), a limbless
You’ve most likely never seen an ant like this before: in an ultra-closeup, Lithuanian photographer Eugenijus Kavaliauskas snapped a shot of an ant’s face that looks like a still from some fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings. The picture has been honored as an ‘Image of Distinction‘ in the 2022 Small World Photomicrography
How does the human brain keep track of the order of events in a sequence? Research suggests that ‘time cells’ – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which
Playing with my children on a beach on Hatteras Island, a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina, I struck up a conversation with a man walking his dog. We were standing next to a turtle nest, which the National Park Service had roped off with a sign stating that the spot was federally
When it comes to dramatic and awe-inspiring pictures of space, few can contend with what appears to be a pic of, well, nothing at all: a fascinating image of what seems to be a hole in the fabric of space, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Described as a “cosmic keyhole” by experts, the
NASA scientists, using a tool designed to study how dust affects climate, have identified more than 50 spots around the world emitting major levels of methane, a development that could help combat the potent greenhouse gas. ”Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release
Below is a picture of Earth and the Moon. Our planet is obvious, on the far right side of the image, but the Moon is a little harder to spot. Do you see it? This isn’t a prank. The Moon is there. NASA’s Lucy probe, a mission to a group of asteroids near Jupiter, snapped
Here on Earth, life finds a way in some of our most extreme and unlikely environments, so it’s possible that microbial life may have once eked a living on our neighboring red planet, too. New laboratory simulations replicating some of the extreme conditions such life would have encountered suggest signs of these microbes may still
For centuries, the crypt of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Austria has preserved a tragic secret. A boy, perhaps no older than a year or two in age, who died not from a lack of food, or injury. But for a simple want of sunlight on his skin. The male child was found
The history of Earth’s bombardment with cosmic radiation is written in the trees. Specifically, when radiation slams into Earth’s atmosphere, it can alter any nitrogen atoms it slams into to produce a form of carbon, which is in turn absorbed by plants. Linking spikes in this carbon isotope with the growth rings in trees can
Ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of melting permafrost, almost like something out of a horror movie. From incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old. Not all of these things are dead. Centuries-old moss was able to spring
Peering down through the layers that make up Earth – the crust, the upper mantle, the lower mantle, and the core – is no easy task. After all, it’s not as if there’s a cross-section of the planet readily available for study. Now scientists think they have discovered a new mineral in the lower mantle,
The Fermi Paradox won’t go away. It’s one of our most compelling thought experiments, and generations of scientists keep wrestling with it. The paradox pits high estimates for the number of civilizations in the galaxy against the fact that we don’t see any of those civs. It says that if rapidly expanding civilizations exist in
You are more likely to take a trip to the Moon than to see a microbe called Legendrea loyezae under a microscope. NASA’s Apollo program has sent a total of 24 people to the Moon between 1968 and 1972. Only four people (including us) have ever found L. loyezae from its discovery in 1908 to
Around 27,000 years ago, an immense sheet of ice coated two-thirds of the British Isles, making the region less than hospitable for human habitation. That all changed as the warming climate transformed the landscape, inviting communities to find a new home on its fertile soils. Archeologists are piecing together the stories of those early migrants,
A relatively small, dense object cloaked within a cloud of its own exploded remains just a few thousand light-years away is defying our understanding of stellar physics. By all accounts it seems to be a neutron star, though it’s an unusual one at that. At just 77 percent of the mass of the Sun, it’s
Parents often worry about the harmful impacts of video games on their children, from mental health and social problems to missing out on exercise. But a large new US study published in JAMA Network Open on Monday indicates there may also be cognitive benefits associated with the popular pastime. Lead author Bader Chaarani, an assistant
Scientists continue to blow through data transmission records, with the fastest transmission of information between a laser and a single optical chip system now set at 1.8 petabits per second. That’s well in excess of the amount of traffic passing across the entire internet each second. Here’s another comparison: the average broadband download speed in
If your cat isn’t responding to your calls of adoration, you might want to consider whether they are just ignoring you. In a series of experiments on 16 house cats, researchers have shown feline pets know their owner’s voice. They also behave differently when their owners are talking to them, as opposed to another person.
Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as “fiction.” Titled “Circular Claims Fall Flat Again,” the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by US households in 2021, only 2.4
Scientists can now “decode” people’s thoughts without even touching their heads, The Scientist reported. Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples’ brains. The new method, described in a report posted 29 Sept. to the preprint database bioRxiv, instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI
Half a century ago, the American mathematician Edward Lorentz famously inquired whether a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil might, through a chaotic domino effect, set off a tornado in Texas. If he’d instead asked whether enough locusts flapping their wings could charge the air with the potency of a thunderstorm, the question might have
Soaring thousands of feet above the meandering trails of the Yosemite Valley floor, monoliths with names like El Capitan and Sentinel Rock stand watch like mythological titans of old. Just how long they’ve dominated the landscape isn’t clear, with previous estimates on their emergence ranging anywhere from tens of millions to just 15 million years
A team of ‘aquanauts’ has discovered the Maldives is an oasis for deep ocean life in a large watery desert. A recent submarine mission around a deepwater seamount in the archipelago has revealed a new kind of thriving ecosystem, which researchers say has never been described before. They’re calling it ‘The Trapping Zone’: a 500-meter-deep
What if you placed an Earth-sized planet in a close orbit around an M-dwarf star? It’s more than an academic question, since M dwarfs are the most numerous stars we know. A group of astronomers studying the planet GJ 1252b found an answer, and it’s not pretty. Since this planet is so close to its
Dazzling as it often appears, fashion in the animal kingdom can be frightfully repetitive. There are only so many color templates that scream ‘look at me’ amid the greys and greens of foliage and muck. So it should be no surprise that animals often use the same colors for very different purposes. The brilliant crimson
Despite all we’ve discovered about our close Neanderthal cousins over the past century, there are still plenty of lingering questions. We know Neanderthals were proficient hunters, for example, but we still aren’t sure to what degree they supplemented their diet with plants… if at all. By studying dental tartar taken from Neanderthal remains uncovered on
In the ongoing work to realize the full potential of quantum computing, scientists could perhaps try peering into our own brains to see what’s possible: A new study suggests that the brain actually has a lot in common with a quantum computer. The findings could teach us a lot about the functions of neurons as
Life might have wiped itself out on early Mars. That’s not as absurd as it sounds; that’s sort of what happened on Earth. But life on Earth evolved and persisted, while on Mars, it didn’t. Evidence shows Mars was once warm and wet and had an atmosphere. In the ancient Noachian Period, between 3.7 billion
Teeny tiny jumping spiders, with their wondrous eyes, seem to be able to do something we’d only ever seen before in vertebrates: distinguishing between animate and inanimate objects. In a 2021 test, wild jumping spiders (Menemerus semilimbatus) behaved differently when presented with simulated objects of both kinds, in ways that indicated an ability to discern
Billions of hooks, millions of traps, and hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fishing line and nets fall into the ocean each year from commercial fishing ventures. Once lost to the wild, this drifting gear continues to snag helpless sea life in a phenomenon called ghost fishing. These items pile onto the mountains of ocean
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