In 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) had reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since the Pliocene Era (ca. 3 million years ago). According to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), “excess carbon dioxide” in our atmosphere will result in a
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When it comes to discovering lost civilizations, it’s a pretty big find: close to 1,000 previously hidden Maya settlements have been found in northern Guatemala thanks to LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) laser scanning from the air. The area that these settlements cover is vast: the buildings and structures spotted by researchers stretch across some
A new study suggests Tyrannosaurus rex had the brains to match its brawn. According to neuroanatomist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, the predatory dinosaurs with tiny arms that are often described as dim-witted dopes might have been as brainy as modern monkeys – or at least had a comparable number of brain cells. Not all paleontologists are convinced,
When it comes to finding life outside of our Solar System, planets that closely resemble Earth seem like a good place to start. We can now welcome celestial object TOI 700 e to that group of promising leads. TOI 700 e has been confirmed orbiting inside the habitable zone of its star, TOI 700. That’s
After more than 200 years of being on public display, the 7-foot, 7-inch (2.31-meter) tall skeleton of ‘Irish giant’ Charles Byrne is being removed as an exhibit from the Hunterian Museum in London. Byrne had an undiagnosed benign tumor of the pituitary gland, causing an abundance of the body’s growth hormone and gigantism. The showcasing
Scientists have discovered a new way to identify the average ages when men and women reproduced throughout human evolutionary history. By studying DNA mutations in modern humans, they discovered a window that let them peek 250,000 years back in time. “Through our research on modern humans, we noticed that we could predict the age at
If we ever detect an Extraterrestrial Civilization (ETC) and start communicating with them, the messages could take years, decades, or even centuries to travel back and forth. We face a challenging 49-minute long delay just communicating with the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, and that’s well within our Solar System. Communicating with an ETC that’s hundreds
Since its launch in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been breaking records. Now the instrument has spotted its first planet around a star other than our own, and with an estimated diameter equaling around 99 percent of Earth’s it looks somewhat familiar. Observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) hinted
It turns out that time travel into the past is actually relatively easy. All you need to do is make the universe rotate. The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel was a friend and neighbor of Albert Einstein at Princeton. He became incredibly curious about Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was and continues to be our
Deforestation in the Amazon is nearing the point of no return, and if this ecosystem falls, it could flip from a vast carbon sink to a gushing carbon tap. Already, some climate scientists suspect the rainforest is spewing more carbon than it’s absorbing. If the Amazon crosses a critical threshold of self-resilience, a new study
ExxonMobil – formerly known as Exxon, and one of the world’s leading oil and gas companies – had the numbers on climate change way back in 1977, according to a recent review of internal documents held secret by the company for nearly five decades. In 2015, investigative journalists from the Los Angeles Times and The
Another year, another climate record broken. In 2022, an international team of scientists measured the hottest global ocean temperatures in human history. That makes 2022 the seventh year in a row that ocean temperatures have hit new peaks. The record is based on two international timelines of ocean heat data stretching back to the 1950s:
The animal world is full of delightfully odd genitals, from argonauts that detach their own sperm-bearing arm and send it off to find a female to mate with, to echidna males with four tipped penises. Some insects have even weaponized their genitals to fight predators. In another stand-out arrangement, male and female cave-dwelling barklice Neotrogla
Archaeologists used a battered skull, found in the crypt of a Medieval Italian church, to reconstruct a brutal scene that took place more than 800 years ago. The skull belongs to a young male, and because he was buried in the San Biagio’s main atrium, he is thought to be a member of the wealthy
Russia said Wednesday that it will send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) next month to bring home three astronauts whose planned return vehicle was damaged by a strike from a tiny meteoroid. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, made the announcement after examining the flight worthiness of the Soyuz MS-22 crew capsule
We all know our galaxy, the Milky Way, is big. Really big. But, exactly how far out does it extend? Where are the outer limits? Astronomers aren’t exactly sure, precisely. However, a study of galaxies in the Virgo Cluster accidentally turned up a population of stars in the outer part of the Milky Way. They
Silently churning away at the heart of every atom in the Universe is a swirling wind of particles that physics yearns to understand. No probe, no microscope, and no X-ray machine can hope to make sense of the chaotic blur of quantum cogs whirring inside an atom, leaving physicists to theorize the best they can
If nothing is done to immediately conserve water in Utah, scientists in the United States say the Great Salt Lake as we know it will disappear in as little as five years. At this point, to reverse the decline, enough water to cover more than 2.5 million acres of land (over 10,000 square kilometers) a
The last eight years were the warmest on record even with the cooling influence of a La Niña weather pattern since 2020, the European Union’s climate monitoring service said Tuesday. Average temperatures across 2022 – which saw a cascade of unprecedented natural disasters made more likely and deadly by climate change – make it the
The global pandemic has forced entire populations around the world into working from home, often bringing people into close proximity with loved ones and relatives 24/7. According to a recent study by researchers from the US and China, the experience of mingling domestic needs with career tasks poses very different challenges for the respective halves
The extinction risk to Madagascar’s mammals, including unique species like the lemur, threatens a biodiversity crisis that would take more than 20 million years to heal, scientists warned Tuesday. The southern Indian Ocean island has been cut off from the African continent for over 80 million years – a separation that has developed an extraordinary
What do a little penguin, a baby rabbit, a black rat, and a Krefft’s glider have in common? They’ve all been presented to me (when dead) by my animal companions. Chances are, if you live with a cat or dog, you’ve also been brought something similar. So, is it a gift, are they showing off,
Smallpox has left an unmistakable mark on human history, killing at least 300 million people in the 20th century alone. In spite of its notoriety, the virus‘s origins still remain elusive. Now, a team of scientists in Italy has pushed our best estimates for the emergence of smallpox back by another 2,000 years, verifying historical
Commercial beekeepers in the United States will soon have access to a vaccine that could save their hives from the most devastating disease honeybees face today. The medicine was designed by the biotech company Dalan Animal Health to ward off American foulbrood (AFB), a contagious condition caused by a spore-forming bacterium Paenibacillus larvae. Incorporated into
The most powerful volcanic eruptions in the Solar System occur not on Earth, but on Io, a sulfurous moon orbiting the planet Jupiter. And now, researchers from the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in the US have noticed a recent outburst that’s been surprisingly productive, even for a hellish world like Io. In the space around
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released an hour-long time-lapse video that shows 133 days of the Sun’s life. The video shows the Sun’s chaotic surface, where great loops of plasma arch above the star along magnetic field lines. Sometimes the looping plasma reconnects to the star, and other times it’s ejected into space, creating
For most people around the world, physical work takes up a great amount of time and energy every day. But what determines whether it is men or women who are working harder in households? In most hunter-gatherer societies, men are the hunters and women are the gatherers – with men seemingly walking the furthest. But
Fur is a defining feature of being a mammal. But bald is beautiful for several mammalian weirdos, including dolphins, mole rats, elephants, and of course, humans. Not to mention a handy adaptation. Yet all our ancestors had plenty of fur. According to a new study on relatively hairless mammals, we still have the means to
The ozone layer that shields life on Earth from deadly solar radiation is on track to recover within decades, but controversial geoengineering schemes to blunt global warming could reverse that progress, a major scientific assessment warned Monday. Since the mid-1970s, certain industrial aerosols have led to the depletion of ozone in the stratosphere, 11 to
Parasites are not all bad, and in a rapidly changing world, they need our protection, but they don’t seem to be getting it. In fact, in the second-largest estuary in the United States, scientists have cataloged a mass die-off among marine organisms that rely on free-living hosts to survive. Over the past 140 years, from
All life is made up of cells several magnitudes smaller than a grain of salt. Their seemingly simple-looking structures mask the intricate and complex molecular activity that enables them to carry out the functions that sustain life. Researchers are beginning to be able to visualize this activity to a level of detail they haven’t been
Say hello to ionocaloric cooling: a new way to lower the mercury that has the potential to replace existing methods with something that is safer and friendlier to the planet. Typical refrigeration systems transport heat away from a space via a gas that cools as it expands some distance away. As effective as this process
Researchers say they have discovered what they call a “proto-writing system” embedded in 20,000-year-old cave paintings, making it the earliest form of some sort of writing we’ve ever found. Hunters from the Upper Palaeolithic era would have used the symbols daubed on the walls to pass on essential survival information: The researchers suggest they show
A newly discovered comet could be visible to the naked eye as it shoots past Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers have said. The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first spotted it passing Jupiter in March last year.
When the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope entered low-Earth orbit in 2008, it opened our eyes to a whole new Universe of high-energy radiation. One of its more curious discoveries was the Fermi Bubbles: giant, symmetrical blobs extending above and below the galactic plane, 25,000 light-years on each side from the Milky Way’s center, glowing in
Researchers believe that ancient stone tools discovered in Brazil are the work of capuchin monkeys, not early humans, the art and design website Artnet reported, citing an academic article. “We are confident that the early archeological sites from Brazil may not be human-derived but may belong to capuchin monkeys,” wrote archaeologist Agustín M. Agnolín and
Over the decades, scientists have held a literal mirror up to various animals to determine whether their minds feature some kind of representation of self. Elephants, apes, dolphins, Eurasian magpies and cleaner wrasse fish are just some of the menagerie to join humans and chimpanzees in this exclusive club, each responding to their reflection in
In a recent study published in Astronomy and Astrophysical Letters, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used various computer models to examine 69 confirmed binary black holes to help determine their origin and found their data results changed based on the model’s configurations. Essentially, the input consistently altered the output,
New year, new resolutions. It is that time once again. A recent survey shows that almost 58 percent of the UK population intended to make a new year’s resolution in 2023, which is approximately 30 million adults. More than a quarter of these resolutions will be about making more money, personal improvement, and losing weight.
The ancient Romans were masters of building and engineering, perhaps most famously represented by the aqueducts. And those still functional marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable concrete that gave Roman structures their incredible strength. Even today, one of their structures – the infamous Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000
A nearly 28,000-year-old cave lion cub, discovered frozen in the Siberian permafrost, is so well preserved, you can still make out each and every one of her whiskers. Researchers in Sweden suggest that the cub, nicknamed Sparta, is among the best preserved Ice Age animals ever uncovered. Her teeth, skin, and soft tissue have all
There’s a lot more out there in space than immediately meets the eye. In the sparse chasms that yawn between the galaxies gravitationally bound in huge clusters, lone stars wander alone, like cosmic rōnin, misplaced and unconstrained. We don’t know where these stars came from. Were they kicked out from host galaxies? Or were they
Scientists have engineered a species of roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans) to absorb light to live a significantly longer life. By adding a light-sensitive trigger to power-converting organelles known as mitochondria, researchers from the US and Germany extended the time sufficient energy could be provided to the cells before aging processes took over. While the scientists emphasize
Half of the Earth’s glaciers, notably smaller ones, are destined to disappear by the end of the century because of climate change, but limiting global warming could save others, according to a new study. The findings, published in the journal Science on Thursday, provide the most comprehensive look so far at the future of the
Many believe our particularly large brain is what makes us human – but is there more to it? The brain’s shape, as well as the shapes of its component parts (lobes) may also be important. Results of a study we published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution show that the way the different parts of
We can confidently say that birds are dinosaur descendants, though paleontologists are still puzzled as to how this incredible evolutionary event occurred. Now a complete fossilized skeleton of a bird that lived in what is today China around 120 million years ago might help clarify key steps in the transformation process, presenting with a more
Beavers are taking over the Alaskan tundra, completely transforming its waterways, and accelerating climate change in the Arctic. The changes are so sudden and drastic that they’re clearly visible from space. As the Arctic tundra warms, woody plants are growing along its rivers and streams, creating perfect habitats for beavers. As the furry rodents move
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the Solar System’s prime extraterrestrial locations for life to thrive. It harbors a global salty ocean that internal heating theoretically keeps at temperatures hospitable to an alien marine ecosystem. Detecting that life, however, is not such an easy matter. The moon is enclosed by a shell of ice that’s