Until the late 19th century, the success of criminal investigations largely hung on witness reports and (often extorted) confessions. A lack of scientific tools meant investigators needed advanced deductive reasoning abilities – and even then they’d often hit a dead end. Today, investigations demand an interdisciplinary and high-tech approach, involving experts from diverse scientific disciplines.
Month: July 2023
A Bronze Age arrowhead excavated in Switzerland in the 19th century turns out to be made from an unexpected material. The tiny artifact is made from iron retrieved from an object that fell from the sky. But there’s a twist. It wasn’t even the closest meteorite to the settlement at the time. Rather, a team
On a basic level, a star is pretty simple. Gravity squeezes the star trying to collapse it, which causes the inner core to get extremely hot and dense. This triggers nuclear fusion, and the heat and pressure from that pushes back against gravity. The two forces balance each other while a star is in its
Super-heated seawater off the Florida Keys has grown so perilous to the world’s third-largest barrier reef that scientists are now removing samples of coral from ocean nurseries to place in cooler land-based tanks. Sea temperatures off Florida have risen to extraordinary highs this month, presenting a severe threat to the barrier reef. “Hot water is
Caecilian mothers grow a fatty skin layer for their babies to tear off and eat. It offers not only nourishment for their offspring but also microbes, providing a starter kit for their young’s own microbiome, new research has discovered. Caecilians are weird, mysterious creatures. They look sort of like huge worms or small snakes, but
Scientists have discovered an “astounding diversity” of giant viruses taking on “previously unimaginable” shapes and forms in just a few handfuls of forest soil. These giant viruses have alien-looking appendages and internal structures that have never been seen before. The soil sample was collected in 2019 from Harvard Forest, a short drive from Boston in
New research sheds light on a tricky idea of consciousness: There’s a difference between what the brain takes in and what we’re consciously aware of taking in. Scientists now think they’ve pinpointed the brain region where that conscious awareness is managed. The team, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the University of
New observations of the roiling cloud of dust around a baby star have revealed what looks like the early stages in the gestation of giant planets. By using the Very Large Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, astronomers have identified clumps in the thick material around a star named V960 Mon that could gravitationally
On the heels of a new record high in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic reached its hottest-ever level this week, several weeks earlier than its usual annual peak, according to preliminary data released Friday by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The news comes after scientists confirmed that July is on track to be
Say hello to ionocaloric cooling. It’s a new way to lower temperatures with the potential to replace existing methods of chilling things with a process that is safer and better for the planet. Typical refrigeration systems transport heat away from a space via a gas that cools as it expands some distance away. As effective
The search for alien life has always been hampered by the huge racket that Earth generates, rendering it difficult to tease out alien signals from all the local noise. But a new method for recognizing radio signals traveling through interstellar space could narrow the search considerably. “I think it’s one of the biggest advances in
Scientists have discovered an exceptional case of a partially warm-blooded fish, fundamentally changing our understanding of fish physiology. The fact that basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) show elevated body temperatures while swimming is like “finding that cows have wings,” says marine biologist Nicholas Payne from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Of all the shark and fish
Scientists said on Friday they have genetically engineered female fruit flies that can have offspring without needing a male, marking the first time ‘virgin birth” has been induced in an animal. The offspring of the flies were also able to give birth without mating, showing that the trait could be passed down generations, in another
Digging deep into the Volyn quartz mine, near the city of Zhytomyr in Ukraine, scientists have discovered the oldest three-dimensional microfossils ever found – trapped in time some 1.5 billion years ago. Being able to get a window that far back into history is of course hugely exciting for experts. Fossils can tell us a
Ancient grains of dust are revealing the life story of a Solar System asteroid. According to an analysis of grains collected from asteroid Ryugu, at least part of the carbon-rich rock started its life much farther from the Sun before ending up in the asteroid belt and then, ultimately, at roughly Earth’s distance from the
Playful behavior was once considered a rare phenomenon in the animal kingdom, and yet recent evidence suggests birds, bees, apes, marsupials, lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and maybe even fish can all engage in play. A new study on the ‘rough and tumble’ play of young rats supports the idea that social amusement is instinctual among mammals
Science fiction is rife with fanciful tales of deadly organisms emerging from the ice and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting human victims. From shape-shifting aliens in Antarctica, to super-parasites emerging from a thawing woolly mammoth in Siberia, to exposed permafrost in Greenland causing a viral pandemic – the concept is marvellous plot fodder. But just how
Astronomers have spotted a “once-in-a-lifetime” comet shaped like the Millennium Falcon – and sky gazers may soon be able to see it for themselves without a telescope. The comet, known as Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, abruptly brightened 100-fold on July 20 as plumes of debris and ice were blasted off it into space. This gave it a
Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets, and asteroids. And each year we’re discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home. Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets
You probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how heavy your hands are – but if you had to make a guess, you’d probably be wrong. A small study that asked people to compare their hands to various weights suggests that humans generally underestimate the mass of their hands by just over 49 percent. A
Twenty years of satellite data show that a stretch of coastal desert extending south from Peru’s north and into Chile is getting greener, but this is not good news. “This is a warning sign, like the canary in the mine,” cautions Cambridge University mathematician Hugo Lepage. Scattered mist oases filled with unique vegetation, called lomas,
An international effort to revive an ancient roundworm, frozen in Siberian permafrost for millennia, has unleashed a lifeform even older than scientists once thought. In 2018, several resurrected nematodes, of the genus Panagrolaimus, were dated to around 32,000 years old. But now, more precise radiocarbon dating suggests these soil worms have remained ‘dead awake’ in
A power outage at NASA headquarters in Houston temporarily disrupted communications with the International Space Station. For the first time since the ISS became fully operational in 2009, the space agency had to rely on its backup control systems to re-establish contact with the astronauts on board, hundreds of kilometers above the surface of Earth.
The biggest volcano in the Solar System could once have been an island in a vast sea, new research has found. When Mars was young, and soggy, billions of years ago, the colossal Olympus Mons may have resembled Stromboli or Savai’i, but on a much larger scale. A new analysis shows similarities with active volcanic
Roughly 2,000 Magellanic penguins have washed up dead on the beaches of Uruguay this July with empty stomachs and “tremendously thin” bodies. “This is mortality in the water,” Carmen Leizagoyen, who works at Uruguay’s Environment Ministry, told AFP. “Ninety percent are young specimens that arrive without fat reserves and with empty stomachs.” The cause of
Standing atop the mountains in the southern highlands of Peru is the 15th-century marvel of the Inca empire, Machu Picchu. Today, the citadel is a global tourist attraction and an icon of precolonial Latin American history – but it was once the royal palace of an emperor. Our international team of researchers has uncovered the
Decades ago, regulations for laboratory maintenance were not quite as stringent as they are today. This, we assume, is at least partially what led the great minds at what was then the US National Accelerator Laboratory, now Fermilab, to an ingenious solution for cleaning a particle accelerator back in 1971. It was February. The Main
A massive galaxy has created a rare distortion in the path of light that has traveled billions of years to reach us from a more distant galaxy. It’s called an Einstein cross – when the curvature of space-time around a massive foreground object splits the light behind it into four, like the points of a
Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) are some of the most ferocious plants on Earth. These carnivorous plants appear most fearsome in the moments before they pounce, when they are poised to ensnare their prey. Fangs agape, the Venus flytrap waits. Until an insect or spider tickles one of its sensory hairs – once, twice – then
For years, as the climate warms, Siberia’s permafrost has been showing signs of collapse, with sinkholes appearing out of nowhere and bubbles of gas erupting under people’s feet. The biggest and most well known of those sinkholes is known by the local Yakutian people as the ‘doorway to the underworld’. When we reported on the
2023 has gone from bad to worse for Earth’s southern ocean. In February, climate researchers announced that Antarctica’s sea ice had hit its lowest summer level since satellite records began 45 years ago. A few months later, in June, during what should be a ‘winter growth phase‘, floating sea ice around Antarctica was still struggling
Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer is filled with the titular physicist’s worst nightmares of nuclear war. Ominous visions of mushroom clouds bursting from city after city, stacks of fire rising past the clouds, and ripples of radiation engulfing Europe haunt Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer. As the director of the secret Los Alamos laboratory, where
Shallow waters off south Florida topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8C) for several hours on Monday, potentially setting a new world record with temperatures more commonly associated with hot tubs. The readings were taken from a single buoy in Manatee Bay, about 38 miles (60 kilometers) southwest of Miami, at a depth of five feet (1.5
A major ocean current system in the Atlantic could be about to collapse as soon as 2025, concerning new peer-reviewed research suggests. This is particularly concerning in light of the current heat extremes we’re witnessing across the globe, including a massive departure from previous records in the Atlantic Ocean itself. “Here we calculate when the
A beautifully preserved fossil forest uncovered on a river bank in Japan has been described in detail for the first time. The rare site takes scientists one step closer to reconstructing an entire Eurasian plant from the late Miocene epoch, and filling in one of the many gaps in the botanical tree of life. The
A giant creature thought to inhabit the waters of Scotland’s Loch Ness remains a popular subject of speculation, in spite of pretty thorough debunkings. One of the last plausible explanations for the beast has now too joined the discard pile. After careful investigation, data scientist Floe Foxon of Pinney Associates and the Folk Zoology Society
In 2022, the Royal Australian Mint issued a $2 coin decorated with honeybees. Around 2,400 years earlier, a mint in the kingdom of Macedon had the same idea, creating a silver obol coin with a bee stamped on one side. Over the centuries between these two events, currency demonstrating a symbolic link between honey and
You’ve just finished a cup of coffee at your favorite cafe. Now you’re facing a trash bin, a recycling bin and a compost bin. What’s the most planet-friendly thing to do with your cup? Many of us would opt for the recycling bin – but that’s often the wrong choice. In order to hold liquids,
Tiger sharks are usually solitary creatures, but nothing brings the scavengers together like the delicious scent of a dead whale. These big blubber buffets can draw dozens of sharks all at once, yet such feasts are seldom caught on camera. In late June, a drone flying off the coast of Queensland, Australia captured an exceptional
Deep under the ocean, not all ecosystems are built alike. And, as an international team of scientists has now found, the very deepest depths are dominated by a particular kind of organism. Below a depth of around 4,400 meters (14,436 feet), most of the creatures lurking in the darkness have soft, squishy bodies. It’s only
One of the most interesting baby planet systems in the Milky Way has just yielded a detection of water vapor. And not just anywhere, either. In the extended disk of dust and gas that still clings to the star PDS 70, the James Webb Space Telescope detected the molecular signature of water in the region
A new observation reveals the ongoing effect humanity had after intercepting a chunk of rock drifting around the Sun last year. In September 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos. Hubble’s latest observations show a giant swarm of boulders shaken loose by the impact, scattered like stars in the asteroid‘s wake. The new
We know that meat has a substantial impact on the planet, and that plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable. But exactly how much impact does the food we eat have on environmental outcomes and what difference would following a vegan diet make compared to consuming a high meat, or even low meat diet? We studied
What happens to the body when a human gets heatstroke? How can we protect ourselves in a warming planet? To answer these burning questions, Arizona researchers have deployed a robot that can breathe, shiver and sweat. The southwestern state’s capital Phoenix is currently enduring its longest heat wave in history: on Friday, the mercury exceeded
According to our predominant cosmological models, Dark Matter accounts for roughly 85% of the mass in the Universe. While ongoing efforts to study this mysterious, invisible mass have yielded no direct evidence, astrophysicists have been able to measure its influence by observing Dark Matter Haloes, gravitational lenses, and the effect of General Relativity on large-scale
News about switching to greener energy sources is always good news, and this certainly counts: The world’s largest wind turbine constructed to date is now up and running and contributing to the power grid in China. The MySE 16-260 earns its largest-ever tag thanks to its rotor diameter of 260 meters (853 feet) and its
A submerged volcano is exuding hot fluid deep below the sea off the Pacific coast of Canada, and thousands of eggs look like ravioli on its summit. The crew of the 2023 Northeast Pacific Deep-sea Expedition provided a captivating wrap-up video of their once-in-a-lifetime scientific expedition to the underwater volcano that was believed to be
Trust in the truth is a major talking point these days. How we respond to the greatest global emergencies of our time depends on the outcome of that discussion. Emerging evidence now suggests that a popular tactic for improving public trust in science is actually based on a myth. A new survey among 705 individuals
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