Paleontologists have unearthed the fossils of two 160 million-year-old lamprey species, discovering the once small fish had already evolved into monster chompers – growing more than ten times longer than the earliest lampreys. The earliest fossil evidence of lampreys dates back 360 million years, earning them the nickname ‘living fossils’ due to their long history
Month: October 2023
Jupiter may be a roiling, uninhabitable ball of tempestuous gas, but that doesn’t mean it can’t give us the screaming willies from time to time. Even aside from its mind-boggling size, and storms that could easily engulf our entire world, the cloud formations that mix and swirl across the planet can take some unnerving forms.
We like to say we know less about the ocean here on Earth than we do about the surface of Mars, because while we have a vague idea of its overall structure, we’ve only properly seen less than 0.05 percent of our oceans. Imagine we discover an alien planet that’s teeming with life, and we’ve
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured new views of a stunning nebula, revealing never-before-seen details. A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust often formed from the debris of dying or exploding stars. These clouds are also cradles of new stars, with the gas and dust providing the building blocks for stellar
In the wake of the destructive Hurricane Otis, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment in the history of weather forecasting. The hurricane roared ashore with 165mph winds and torrential rainfall, slamming into the coastal city of Acapulco, Mexico and claiming the lives of at least 48 people. The speed at which Otis intensified was
In July of this year, an asteroid roughly 30 to 60 meters across passed Earth to within one-quarter of the distance to the Moon. It posed no threat to our world, but if it had struck Earth it would have created a blast three times greater than the 2013 Chelyabinsk impact. And we only noticed
Fine dust suspended in the atmosphere may have played a significant role in the extinction of dinosaurs after all. It’s largely accepted that around 66 million years ago, a space rock larger than Mount Everest smashed into what is today the coast of Mexico, setting off a cascade of catastrophes that ultimately killed three-quarters of
As humanity eyes the strange frontiers beyond Earth’s borders, making its first tottering steps towards the stars, new questions about our future begin to emerge. One thing that has yet to be tested is the propagation of the species. Will we, as we boldly go, be able to continue to reproduce, to grow new humans
Pick any object in the Universe, and it is probably spinning. Asteroids tumble end over end, planets and moons rotate on their axes, and even black holes spin. And for everything that spins, there is a maximum rate at which it can rotate. The black hole in our galaxy is spinning at nearly that maximum
In data nearly 20 years old, scientists have finally confirmed the presence of infrared auroras, glowing in the northern regions of Uranus. It’s a discovery that allows astronomers to fill in some of the unknowns about the Uranian auroras, and perhaps shed some light on why the planet is so much hotter than it should
How did we get here? Not just we humans, scrabbling about on a pale blue dot, hurtling around a star, hurtling around a supermassive black hole, hurtling through the local cluster. But how did the dot get here, and the star, and the black hole, and the cluster? How did the incomprehensibly immense everything of
In the two years between June 2014 and May 2016, world leaders came together and adopted the landmark Paris Agreement, and the global average sea level rose by a staggering 15 millimeters or 0.6 inches. Although that rise isn’t much more than the length of a fingernail, it was actually a frightening leap on long-term
Most of us are very much devoted to our pets, but a new study shows a discrepancy between dog owners and cat owners in terms of the care and attention they give to their animal companions. The international team of researchers behind the study compiled the survey results of 2,117 people across the UK, Denmark,
A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology (CIT) suggests the Long Valley Caldera in eastern California is restlessly tossing and turning as its deep magma chamber cools down for a big, long sleep. The last time the volcano blew was roughly 100,000 years ago. Long before that, it spewed up enough
Certainly, lots of people believe in ghosts – a spirit left behind after someone who was alive has died. In a 2021 poll of 1,000 American adults, 41% said they believe in ghosts, and 20% said they had personally experienced them. If they’re right, that’s more than 50 million spirit encounters in the U.S. alone.
Diaper waste is a real problem, with an estimated 300,000 of them disposed of every single minute worldwide. Now, scientists may have come up with a solution: a process of turning a key part of these diapers into recyclable liquid in just five minutes. The team behind the innovation, from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been confirmed in the Antarctic region after brown skuas on Bird Island, South Georgia, tested positive for the virus. These are the first identified cases of avian influenza in the Antarctic. Researchers have previously expressed concern about the devastating impact an outbreak could have on many wildlife species in
Dutch-born Christiaan Huygens is probably one of the most famous physicists you’ve never heard of. His work in the late 17th century straddled both the intangible and tangible realms of our Universe: the nature of light, and the mechanics of moving objects. Among his many contributions, Huygens proposed a wave theory of light that would
Our Sun is a steady and everlasting companion. Reliable like a clock, its apparent passage across the sky allows us to measure time. The Sun and its path is also the source of Earth’s seasons. But in many respects, our Sun is far from calm and unchanging. Close up, the Sun shows extensive variation and
‘Painting’ with fluorescent markers has long been a handy way to detect unique double-stranded structures in DNA. Once limited to a palette of just 256 colors, scientists can now create stunning works of laboratory art with incredible 16 million shades and hues. The new technique accurately recreates digital images with 24-bit color depth, and the
Humans are outliers for the way many of us, along with a handful of toothed whale species and Asian elephants, will live well beyond our reproductive years. The rarity of menopause among animals has long puzzled researchers, and so has its origins since our close primate relatives didn’t appear to share this marker of fertility’s
Sliding care-free through the complete emptiness of space, light covers a constant 299,792,458 meters every second. No more, no less. This all changes when that wave of electromagnetism is forced to negotiate the electromagnetic fields surrounding bits of matter. Passing through this quagmire, light’s overall speed can slow to a relative crawl. We see this
The kilonova explosion that resulted when two neutron stars slammed into each other a billion light-years away turned out to be factory for rare heavy elements. It’s the first time the James Webb Space Telescope has probed such an event; and, in the aftermath of a colossal gamma-ray burst that emerged on 7 March 2023,
Mars may have a hard, dusty shell, but its interior is layered like a jawbreaker – and surprisingly squishy. Two new papers published in the journal Nature detail the way seismic data reveals the specifics of the Martian interior. Each shows a 150 kilometer (93 miles)-thick layer of molten silicate rock at the base of
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has always been plagued by uncertainty. With only one habitable planet (Earth) and one technologically advanced civilization (humanity) as examples, scientists are still confined to theorizing where other intelligent life forms could be (and what they might be up to). Sixty years later, the answer to Fermi’s famous question
On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around 8:52 that evening a photographic plate captured the light of three stars clustered together. At a
After a journey of seven years and nearly 4 billion miles, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landed gently in the Utah desert on the morning of Sept. 24, 2023, with a precious payload. The spacecraft brought back a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Roughly half a pound of material collected from the 85 million-ton asteroid (77.6 billion
This month has given us some truly breathtaking sky displays, and the weekend ahead holds another treat. On October 28, the Moon will put on a spectacular show in the form of a partial lunar eclipse. Known as a ‘Hunter’s Moon‘ in the Northern Hemisphere, folklore holds that the bright end to the October lunar
NASA is in a bit of a pickle with its container of dirt from asteroid Bennu, delivered to Earth in September after an epic seven-year mission. They know there’s a nice, juicy haul of asteroid in there – but they are having trouble getting the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM, container open. It’s just
Climate change poses an “existential threat” to life on Earth, prominent scientists warned Tuesday, in an assessment on this year’s avalanche of heat records and weather extremes that they said are hitting more ferociously than expected. With expectations that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, regions across the planet have been scorched by
A new analysis of thousands of sets of twins suggests that synesthesia shares genetic roots with autism. In particular, synesthesia seems to be linked to what are known as non-social autism traits, or repetitive and restricted behaviors and interests (RRBIs) – which have also been linked to differences in perception compared to non-autistic individuals. “Our
Sometimes, years of painstaking excavation work are required to uncover the artifacts of the past – and sometimes, as with a recent earthquake in Mexico City, much of the hard digging work is done by nature. The 7.6-magnitude earthquake occurred on 19 September 2022, near Mexico’s west coast, killing two, and the rumbling was felt
Certain types of bacteria can mutate to reproduce more quickly when exposed to microgravity, and that’s not great news for our space tourist dreams, seeing as we humans are teeming with bacteria. It’s not clear why these bacteria respond so positively to microgravity, but researchers are figuring out ways to protect astronauts out in space,
An ancient river system that has not seen the light of day for at least 14 million years has been discovered underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, new research reports. With ice-penetrating radar and satellite data, Durham University glaciologist Stewart Jamieson and colleagues mapped the topographic features of the landscape hidden beneath the East Antarctic
A technique for squeezing light in the arms of LIGO’s interferometer has allowed its measurements to cross the quantum barrier. For LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), it’s a bold new realm of sensitivity, giving the gravitational wave detector the ability to find 60 percent more dead star mergers than the rate of its previous
With their whip-like tails, human sperm propel themselves through viscous fluids, seemingly in defiance of Newton’s third law of motion, according to a new study that characterizes the motion of these sex cells and single-celled algae. Kenta Ishimoto, a mathematical scientist at Kyoto University, and colleagues investigated these non-reciprocal interactions in sperm and other microscopic
Jupiter is the second-largest object in the entire Solar System behind the Sun. Its greatest distance from Earth is just under 4 astronomical units, and we’ve sent quite a number of probes to take a closer look at the giant planet’s wild atmosphere. Yet, somehow, we’re still only just finding never-before seen features in Jupiter’s
The melting of West Antarctica’s ice shelves is likely to substantially accelerate in coming decades even if the world meets ambitions to limit global warming, according to research published Monday, warning it would drive rising sea levels. Researchers warned that humans had “lost control” of the fate of thinning ice shelves – frozen ridges floating
An extreme drought in parts of the Amazon has led to a dramatic drop in river water levels, exposing dozens of usually submerged rock formations with carvings of human forms that may date back some 2,000 years. Livia Ribeiro, a longtime resident of the Amazon’s largest city, Manaus, said she heard about the rock engravings
As Homo sapiens migrated into Eurasia more than 70,000 years ago, much of the continent was already inhabited by Neanderthals, hominins who shared an ancestor with us but had spent roughly half a million years diverging. We don’t know much about their ensuing relationship, but it was probably contentious at times. While Neanderthals eventually disappeared
If there’s a man in the Moon, as the old beliefs go, he’s a pretty venerable one. Earth’s lunar companion is thought to have formed not long after the planet itself, some 4.4 billion years or so ago, when the Solar System was young. It was then, according to theory, that a Mars-sized object smacked
Record concentrations of a helium isotope found inside 62-million-year-old Arctic rocks could be the most compelling evidence to date of a slow leak in our planet’s core. Building on the results of a previous analysis of ancient lava flows, a team of geochemists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the California Institute of Technology are
A recent study published in Nature Astronomy examines the discovery of what astronomers are dubbing “ultra- fast radio bursts“, a new type of fast radio bursts (FRBs) that the team determined lasts for a mind-boggling ten millionths of a second or less. Traditionally, FRBs have been found to last only thousandths of a second, but
Each year, humans worldwide eat over 100 billion bananas, most of which are a type called the Cavendish. But perhaps not for long. A fungal disease threatens to wipe Cavendish bananas off the face of the Earth. Some scientists are genetically modifying the fruit to be more resistant to disease. But the best solution to
The so-called “Devil Comet” is barreling past Earth and exploding on its way around the sun, but a researcher who studies such phenomenon told Insider that while the comet is large and unusual, its menacing name — a reference to the appearance of horns — does not mean it poses any threat to the third
A collision between two neutron stars, tightly bound on a decaying orbit, appears to be a relatively rare event. In the entire Milky Way galaxy, of all the 100 billion stars, scientists reckon there’s only around 10 neutron star binaries destined for a collision. To date, we’ve only detected a handful of the kilonova explosions
Stoop-backed, heavy-browed, communicating in ape-like grunts, impressions of the Neanderthal as a simple-minded brute a few steps below modern humans on the evolutionary ladder have endured since their discovery in the mid-19th century. In spite of the myriad of findings detailing their genetic and cultural similarities, our long-extinct ‘cousins’ are still all too often exiled
The Universe is flooded with billions of chemicals, each a tiny pinprick of potential. And we’ve only identified 1 percent of them. Scientists believe undiscovered chemical compounds could help remove greenhouse gases, or trigger a medical breakthrough much like penicillin did. But let’s just get this out there first: it’s not that chemists aren’t curious.
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