An arrangement of galaxies in a giant bubble has been found not far from the Milky Way, and astronomers believe it could be a relic of the early Universe. Astronomers have named the cluster Ho’oleilana, a Hawaiian name inspired by the chant, Kumulipo, which tells of the creation of structure in the Universe. The cluster’s
Wind and snow don’t always bring about the coldest winters in the Arctic. When snow is blown across sea ice, an international team of researchers has found it can indirectly contribute to regional warming. That happens because snow in the Arctic contains tiny particles of sea salt. If these aerosols are whipped up into the
Amidst remains of turtles and fish preserved in a southeastern China fossil bed, scientists have uncovered the skeleton of a dinosaur with curious bird-like features. Estimated to be roughly 30 million years older than any confirmed bird fossil, the finding could tell us a thing or two about the first critical steps into their evolution.
Using light that has traveled for more than 11 billion years to reach us, scientists have just measured the most distant magnetic field yet. It was emitted by a galaxy called 9io9, which appears as it was just 2.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Mapping its lines should help astronomers understand how galaxies spin
India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission may have just recorded the first seismic data on the Moon since the 1970s. If confirmed to be natural seismic data, it could finally help scientists understand how the Moon’s insides are arranged. The rumblings were recorded by the Vikram lander’s onboard Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA). It’s the first Micro
The site on the lunar south pole where the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) made its historic Moon landing can be seen in a new image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image was taken on 27 August, just a few days after the mission made its epic touchdown on 23 August. The lander appears
Researchers have identified living relatives in Tanzania of people whose skulls were pillaged and taken to Germany during the colonial era, Berlin’s museum authority said on Tuesday, a discovery hailed as a “small miracle”. Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History has been carrying out research on around 1,100 skulls from what was known as
An active supermassive black hole is one of the greatest wonders in the cosmos. A dense, invisible object that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun is surrounded by a vast, churning disk and torus of material, blazing with light as it swirls down onto the black hole center. But how big
Ancient rocks excavated from a site inhabited by early humans some 1.4 million years ago may represent attempts at achieving perfect geometry. Limestone spheroids from the ‘Ubeidiya prehistoric site in Israel were deliberately shaped, archaeologists say, and show signs of improvement the more they were worked. This suggests that the creators had a specific goal
Invasive species that wreck crops, ravage forests, spread disease, and upend ecosystems are spreading ever faster across the globe, and humanity has not been able to stem the tide, a major scientific assessment said Monday. The failure is costing well over $400 billion dollars a year in damages and lost income – the equivalent to
Scientists have been able to observe a common interaction in quantum chemistry for the first time, by using a quantum computer to shadow the process at a speed 100 billion times slower than normal. Known as a conical intersection, the interactions have long been known about, but are usually over in mere femtoseconds – quadrillionths
The golden compound eye of the most powerful space telescope ever built has given us new insight into a star we saw exploding just 36 years ago. In the intervening years, scientists have avidly watched the development of SN 1987A as it bloomed from a blaze of light first seen in February 1987 to a
When strong hurricanes hit land, the uprooted trees, destroyed homes, and other devastation are highly visible. What happens in the marine environments where they churn water and disrupt sediment isn’t always as obvious. A vast array of marine life lives along the Florida peninsula, the US state where hurricanes make landfall most often. The Florida
Mathematicians delight in the beauty of math that so many of us don’t see. But nature is a wonderful realm in which to observe beauty born out of mathematical relationships. The natural world provides seemingly endless patterns underpinned by numbers – if we can recognize them. Luckily for us, a motley team of researchers has
In sediment samples from deep within the ocean, scientists have identified a mysterious and unique new species of marine bacteria that advances our understanding of deep-sea conditions and microbiology in general. A team in China grew the bacteria in the lab using sediment from a cold seep, a specific puddle of nutrient-rich liquid and mud
A team of Peruvian and Japanese archaeologists has unearthed a pre-Hispanic archaeological site in northern Peru dedicated to ancestor worship, with burial chambers, human remains and ceramic offerings. “We have discovered an archaeological site of the Wari period with an antiquity of between 800 to 1000 years CE” in the Cajamarca region 900 kilometers (560
Biologists were stunned to find a mysterious cold-water shark thousands of miles away from its natural habitat, according to a recent marine study. A Greenland shark — the longest-living vertebrate on Earth — was discovered in the tropical Caribbean Sea. Researchers were tagging and temporarily catching tiger sharks off the coast of Belize when they
The discovery of an ancient ape skull may challenge the long-held belief that the ancestors of apes and humans came from Africa, a controversial new study says. The partial skull of the ape, called an Anadoluvius turkae, was found in Cankiri, Turkey, and appears to date back to 8.7 million years ago, Live Science reported.
They say a dog is a man’s best friend, but a new study has found that our pet canines may be more sensitive to the higher-pitched voices of women. An analysis of brain scans by researchers from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology and Eötvös Loránd University in Hungry suggest dogs really do listen
We could be producing concrete that’s 30 percent stronger by processing and adding charred coffee grounds to the mix, researchers in Australia have discovered. Their new recipe could solve multiple problems at the same time. Every year the world produces a staggering 10 billion kilograms of coffee waste globally. Most ends up in landfills. “The
Mud cores drilled in Mississippi hold long-hidden clues about the origins of gigantic Antarctic ice sheets around 34 million years ago, new research shows. Earth was in the midst of a major transition at the time, shifting from the balmy Eocene Epoch to the cooler Oligocene. The planet had no permanent ice during the Eocene,
A newly discovered exoplanet has presented astronomers with an interesting problem. It’s called TOI-332b, and its physical properties and orbital distance from its star are challenging to explain with current planetary formation theory. With so few exoplanets of its kind detected in the Milky Way so far, it could shed some light on why fast-orbiting,
As few as 22 people could sustain a colony of pioneers long enough to establish a human presence on Mars. That’s the conclusion of a new study by a team of researchers in the US that used modeling and simulation to work out the minimum initial population size for a successful Mars colony that goes
NASA has spotted a small new crater on the Moon that was likely caused by a Russian probe crash landing on the surface around two weeks ago. The finding was made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) by comparing before and after images of the estimated impact point, provided by Russian space agency Roscosmos. The
A newly discovered exoplanet has characteristics so peculiar that astronomers think it must have experienced a giant collision some time in its past. TOI-1853b is an exoplanet just a smidge smaller than Neptune, but nearly twice as dense as Earth, suggesting a composition high in rock that’s challenging to explain through normal planet formation and
A sprinkling of tiny beads recovered off the coast of Papua New Guinea might have come from a rock with a rather interesting history, having crossed light years of space from its origin around a star that’s not our Sun. While the conclusions are yet to be appropriately reviewed, they’re already provoking debate in the
Scientists have identified the aromatic ancient recipe that preserved an Egyptian noblewoman who was mummified around 1450 BCE, meticulously recreating ‘the scent of eternity’. Advances in chemical analysis technology enabled detection of individual substances in balm residue from once-sealed canopic jars that stored the mummified organs. In ancient Egypt, mummification was the ultimate art form
Polar bears have long symbolized the dangers posed by climate change, as rising temperatures melt away the Arctic sea ice they depend upon for survival. But quantifying the impact of a single oil well or coal power plant on the tundra predators had eluded scientists, until now. A new report published in the journal Science
The far reaches of the Solar System are a dim and distant realm with particulars that elude us. So far from the light of the Sun, even a relatively large planet could easily escape our notice. The trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) that we have found out there, beyond the orbit of Neptune, exhibit some peculiar clustering
The Pentagon has opened up a new portal on the internet for professionals to submit reports about UFOs — now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and for the rest of us to find out about the reports that have been released. AARO.mil, the website for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, is
Back in 1867, in an effort to test his thoughts on the emerging science of thermodynamics, physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined an intelligent ‘demon’ sorting molecules between two containers based on their energy. In 2023, a less diabolical version of Maxwell’s fictitious demon may have been found. According to a new study from researchers at
It seems like Roald Dahl may have been onto something after all: if you hurt a plant, it screams. Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies outside the range of human hearing that increase when the plant becomes stressed.
Nearly a million years ago, some devastating event nearly wiped out humanity’s ancestors. Genomic data from 3,154 modern humans suggests the population was reduced from approximately 100,000 to just 1,280 breeding individuals around 900,000 years ago. That’s a jaw-dropping population decline of 98.7 percent that lasted 117,000 years and could have brought humanity to extinction.
Weeks after a cybersecurity incident was detected by researchers at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a number of telescopes remain offline. The Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the Gemini South telescope in Chile, as well as a number of smaller telescopes on the mountains of Cerro Tololo in Chile, were shut down out
The abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems are advancing at an astounding rate, nearing or bettering what humans can do in simulations and test environments. Setting aside the ethical and environmental concerns around AI and those of autonomous drones for a minute, we can marvel at this latest feat: an AI-controlled drone system that beat
Climate change has sharply boosted the risk of fast-spreading wildfires, according to a Californian study published Wednesday that offers lessons for prevention after recent disasters in Canada, Greece and Hawaii. Scientists at the Breakthrough Institute, a non-profit research centre, found that human-caused warming increased the frequency of “extreme” wildfires by 25 percent on average compared
A newly observed isotope of oxygen is defying all our expectations for how it should behave. It’s oxygen-28, with the highest number of neutrons ever seen in the nucleus of an oxygen atom. Yet, while scientists believe it should be stable, it decays rapidly – calling into question what we thought we knew about “magic”
Wild boars in southeastern Germany are known to contain high levels of radioactive cesium, which has been widely attributed to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. But radioactivity levels have decreased in other animals while mysteriously persisting in the boars – a peculiar behavior known as the “wild boar paradox”. New research shows nuclear weapons tests from
The fossil fuels that humanity burns today will be a death sentence for many lives tomorrow. A recent review of 180 articles on the human death rate of climate change has settled on a deeply distressing number. Over the next century or so, conservative estimates suggest a billion people could die from climate catastrophes, possibly
India only landed on the Moon last week, but its Chandrayaan-3 mission has already made its first scientific observations of the lunar south pole. By shooting lasers at the surface, the onboard rover has confirmed the presence of sulfur, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced. It’s the first rover to ever explore the
The Whirlpool Galaxy, aka M51, is one of the most well-known objects in the night sky. It’s close enough and prominent in the northern sky that amateur astronomers have shared stunning pictures of it for decades. But you’ve never seen anything like this: M51 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This image
A rare type of particle has emerged from proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider. Between 2016 and 2018, physicists recorded more than 100 rare, unstable hypernuclei – atomic cores that contain an unusual flavor of quark in one of their nuclear particles. It’s a discovery that could help us understand the source of mysterious
A forest blaze in Greece is “the largest wildfire ever recorded in the EU” and the bloc is mobilising nearly half its firefighting air wing to tackle it, a European Commission spokesman said Tuesday. Firefighters have been battling the flames for 11 days in northeastern Greece which have killed at least 20 people and pose
A piece of ancient space rock that ended up on Earth is giving scientists the clues they need to understand the cloud of dust from which the Solar System was born. The rare object is known as Erg Chech 002, and an isotope contained within it suggests a sprinkling of radioactive material from recently exploded
Strange loops in the fabric of reality have finally been witnessed forming in a super cold gas, providing physicists with an opportunity to study the behaviors of a rather peculiar kind of one-sided magnetism. Known as ‘Alice rings’ after the Alice of ‘Wonderland’ fame, the circular structures were observed by a collaboration between researchers in
In all our explorations of Mars to date, no evidence has been found that meets the rigorous standards to claim that we have conclusively found life. But, decades ago in the 1970s, when the Viking landers became the first US mission to safely land on and explore the red planet, we may have been close.
Rumours that there are big cats in Britain stubbornly keep cropping up. The thought of a large predator lurking in the rural landscapes of Britain is an exciting one. The most recent widely published claim of a big black cat in the UK does actually show a photo of a big cat species, which can
Days after becoming the first nation to land a craft near the Moon‘s largely unexplored south pole, India’s space agency said on Monday it will launch a satellite to survey the Sun. “The launch of Aditya-L1, the first space-based Indian observatory to study the Sun, is scheduled for September 2,” the Indian Space Research Organisation
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