For something as chaotic as the wind, meteorologists tend to have a pretty good grip on the kinds of circulating air patterns we might expect to see whipping up storms around the globe. One, it seems, has until now slipped under the radar. In an effort to better understand contrasts in ocean temperature in the
An analysis of a huge chunk of space rock that fell to Earth in Somalia has revealed materials never before seen in nature. Two new minerals have been analyzed and named, and a possible third is currently under consideration by the International Mineralogical Association. This discovery could give scientists some important clues as to the
Archeologists have rediscovered a pre-Hispanic fresco depicting mythological scenes in northern Peru that they had only seen in black and white photographs that were more than a century old. “It’s an exceptional discovery, first of all, because it is rare to unearth wall paintings of such quality in pre-Columbian archeology,” said Sam Ghavami, the Swiss
Light that traveled for more than 8.5 billion years to reach us was the last gasp of a dying star as a black hole swallowed it. Two separate teams of scientists determined that a mysterious glimmer that appeared in the sky in February 2022, named AT2022cmc, was the astrophysical jet that erupted from the massive
An ancient bone is helping scientists refine the timeline of humanity’s relationship with our best friends – the canine companions that have brightened our lives for millennia. How many millennia? Well, no one knows for sure. But precision carbon dating is helping narrow it down. A canine humerus recovered from Erralla cave in the Basque
Most species are transitory. They go extinct, branch into new species or change over time due to random mutations and environmental shifts. A typical mammalian species can be expected to exist for a million years. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around for roughly 300,000 years. So what will happen if we make it to
We’re putting more and more satellites into orbit, and along with all the welcome technological and scientific advances that brings, there are also potential problems. Intended to be the start of an orbiting communications network that can be accessed by standard smartphones, the recently launched prototype BlueWalker 3 satellite is now one of the brightest
When it comes to singing, bats have most species beat tooth over claw. Sure, their tunes might not be on everybody’s top 20 list, but their cries span a tremendous frequency range of around 7 octaves from 1 to 120 kilohertz, rising well outside the range of human hearing. Thanks to a new study of
Without strong climate action, forests on every continent will be highly flammable for at least 30 extra days per year by the end of the century – and this fire threat is far greater for some forests including the Amazon, according to our new study. Our research in Nature Communications looked at 20 years of
SpaceX is set Wednesday to launch the first private – and Japanese – lander to the Moon. A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off at 3:39 am (0839 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a backup date on Thursday. Until now, only the United States, Russia, and China have managed to put a
A study of 26 years’ worth of wolf behavioral data, and an analysis of the blood of 229 wolves, has shown that infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii makes wolves 46 times more likely to become a pack leader. The research shows that the effects of this parasite in the wild have been horrendously understudied
For the first time in decades, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa – the largest active volcano in the world – erupted, turning the sky red. The eruption began around 11:30 pm local time Sunday night (0930 UTC Monday morning) in Mauna Loa’s summit caldera, according to a United States Geological Survey statement. In a 7:20 am local
Some of Earth’s weirdest fungi, including types of lichen, mycorrhizal, and insect symbiotes, never quite seemed to fit in our current tree of life. But a new genetic analysis discovered that despite the extreme differences between these oddballs, they actually all belong together on an entirely new branch that parted ways with other fungi more
Archaeologists have discovered several ancient mummies in Egypt sporting gold chips where their tongues should be. The auspicious discovery was made at the Quweisna (sometimes spelled Quesna) necropolis in the central Nile Delta. Discovered in 1989, the site is thought to have been occupied during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, which stretched from about 300
The Perseverance rover may have just found evidence of organic compounds in the rocks of the Jezero Crater. Previous studies have found evidence of organic compounds on Mars before. The Curiosity rover and the Mars Express orbiter both returned evidence thereof, as has data from Perseverance. None of it necessarily implies some kind of biology
In one of the most polluted rivers in Central America, a vulnerable crocodile species is thriving despite living in waters that have become a sewer for Costa Rica’s capital, experts say. Every day, trash and wastewater from San Jose households and factories flood into the Tarcoles River, which vomits tires and plastic into the surrounding
Today, Mars is colloquially known as the ‘Red Planet’ on account of how its dry, dusty landscape is rich in iron oxide (aka. ‘rust’). In addition, the atmosphere is extremely thin and cold, and no water can exist on the surface in any form other than ice. But as the Martian landscape and other lines
Packs of sausage dogs might have been made to fight larger animals like bears or perform acrobatics in the Colosseum in ancient Rome, archaeologists have said. Archaeologists said they found the remains of small dogs similar to dachshunds for the first time while excavating the drains of the iconic 2,000-year-old amphitheater, The Telegraph reported. “We
Scientists have found small pockets of seawater that have been trapped in rock for some 390 million years, a discovery that could significantly deepen our understanding of how oceans evolve and adapt to changing climate conditions. The tiny amounts of liquid represent waters once populated by great armored fishes, ammonoids, giant sea scorpions, and trilobites.
A newly discovered brain in a 525-million-year-old arthropod fossil looks to be the oldest found so far – and it may have settled an ongoing debate about how brains first evolved in these invertebrate animals. Spotted in a tiny, armored lobopodian known as Cardiodictyon catenulum, the surprise is that the brain survived at all and
Earth is about 29 percent land and 71 percent oceans. How significant is that mix for habitability? What does it tell us about exoplanet habitability? There are very few places on Earth where life doesn’t have a foothold. Multiple factors contribute to our planet’s overall habitability: abundant liquid water, plate tectonics, bulk composition, proximity to
WASP-39b, a gas giant about 700 light-years away, is turning out to be quite the exoplanetary treasure. Earlier this year, WASP-39b was the subject of the first-ever detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System. Now, an in-depth analysis of data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has
NASA’s Orion spacecraft was placed in lunar orbit Friday, officials said, as the much-delayed Moon mission proceeded successfully. A little over a week after the spacecraft blasted off from Florida bound for the Moon, flight controllers “successfully performed a burn to insert Orion into a distant retrograde orbit,” the US space agency said on its
Human babies pack a lot of growth into those nine months between conception and birth to give them and their meaty, complex brains a chance at survival. Just how evolution came to grant humans such a comparatively rapid prenatal growth rate has never been clear. Given how critical brain growth is to early human development,
EMBARGO Friday 25 November 1900 GMT | Saturday 26 November 0600 AEDT Our glorious little blue marble of a planet is filled with an astonishingly diverse array of lifeforms, but some are definitely more peculiar than others. This is particularly true of the octopus, an animal so strange that it regularly invites comparisons to aliens.
For something that emits no light that we can detect, black holes just love to cloak themselves in radiance. Some of the brightest light in the Universe comes from supermassive black holes, in fact. Well, not actually the black holes themselves; it’s the material around them as they actively slurp down vast amounts of matter
For just the sixth time in recorded history, astronomers managed to catch a glimpse of an asteroid before it slammed into Earth. On 19 November 2022, nearly four hours before impact, the Catalina Sky Survey discovered an asteroid named 2022 WJ1 on an inbound trajectory. A network of telescopes and scientists sprang into action, accurately
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesizing. The plants died, then the animals that fed on them. The food chain collapsed. Over 90 percent of all species vanished. When the dust settled,
As the world warms up, vast tranches of permafrost are melting, releasing material that’s been trapped in its icy grip for years. This includes a slew of microbes that have lain dormant for hundreds of millennia in some cases. To study the emerging microbes, scientists have now revived a number of these “zombie viruses” from
Several small, slender pendants uncovered from Stone Age graves on an island in a Russian lake more than 80 years ago have been reimagined after archaeologists reanalyzed the finds using chemical fingerprinting techniques. “To our surprise, the raw material of some of the specimens turned out to be human bone,” archaeologist Kristiina Mannermaa of the
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the
Many children grow up gazing up at the night sky, dreaming of becoming astronauts who boldly go to the Moon – and beyond. But in order to get that elusive job, would-be astronauts must make it through a competitive selection process. For NASA’s 2021 class of astronauts, the space agency said it chose just 10
A team of researchers has cracked a five century-old code which reveals a rumored French plot to kill the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V. Charles was one of the most powerful men of the 16th century, presiding over a vast empire that took in much of western Europe and the Americas
A newly found exoplanet just 200 light-years away could shed new light on one of planetary science’s strangest mysteries. At around 1.8 times the radius of Earth, the object named TOI-1075b ranks among the biggest examples of a super-Earth exoplanet we’ve found to date. It also sits solidly in what we call the small-planet radius
The ripples in space-time generated by colliding black holes have taught us a lot about these enigmatic objects. These gravitational waves encode information about black holes: their masses, the shape of their inward spiral towards each other, their spins, and their orientations. From this, scientists ascertained that most of the collisions we’ve seen have been
We humans can’t stop playing with our food. Just think of all the different ways of serving potatoes – entire books have been written about potato recipes alone. The restaurant industry was born from our love of flavoring food in new and interesting ways. My team’s analysis of the oldest charred food remains ever found
Long dismissed as forgeries, a handful of ancient Roman coins uncovered in Transylvania more than three centuries ago have been authenticated by a new analysis. It’s not hard to see why the coins – dated to the 260s CE – might have been considered fakes. Where most ancient coinage displays the head of an emperor,
At the end of October, a Mississippi resident made a rare discovery along the drought-stricken Mississippi River – a fossilized jawbone from an American lion that roamed the area roughly 11,000 years ago, according to McClatchy News. It’s only the fourth fossil of the ancient American lion found in Mississippi, according to the news outlet.
Is there anything good about volcanoes? They can be violent, dangerous, and unpredictable. For modern humans, volcanoes are mostly an inconvenience, sometimes an intriguing visual display, and occasionally deadly. But when there’s enough of them, and when they’re powerful and prolonged, they can kill the planet that hosts them. Modern-day Venus is a blistering hellscape.
To be a sheep is to blindly follow the crowd. But is a sheep’s sheepiness really enough to make an entire flock walk around in a circle non-stop for days on end? That’s a mystery the internet has pondered for about a week now and solving it has proved more difficult than you’d expect. On
Many of us rely on GPS (Global Positioning System) to estimate travel times, find our way to new places, avoid traffic congestion, keep track of the kids, and generally avoid getting lost. But it’s not always the most reliable of systems, especially in built-up areas where it’s difficult to get a straight line of sight
Seventeen hundred years ago, a female spider monkey was presented as a treasured gift – and later brutally sacrificed – to strengthen ties between two major powers of pre-Hispanic America, according to a new study. The paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), compared the offering by Maya elites
The Orion spacecraft made its first close flyby of the Moon on Monday 21 November, coming as close as 81 statute miles (130 kilometers) from the lunar surface. As the Artemis 1 mission’s uncrewed spacecraft flew past the far side of the Moon, Orion’s orbital maneuvering system engine fired for 2 minutes and 30 seconds
Rising levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere could exacerbate efforts to clean up our increasingly cluttered shell of orbiting space junk. According to two new studies, the greenhouse gas has significantly contributed to the contraction of the upper atmosphere. This contraction has been hypothesized for decades; now, for the first time, it’s been actually
Fast-melting glaciers are releasing staggering amounts of bacteria into rivers and streams, which could transform icy ecosystems, scientists warn. In a study of glacial runoff from 10 sites across the Northern Hemisphere, researchers have estimated that continued global warming over the next 80 years could release hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria into environments
We’re getting closer to resolving the strange mystery presented by hundreds of enormous filaments dangling through the heart of the Milky Way. For the first time, these long, magnetized filaments glowing in radio waves have been observed emerging from other galaxies. Not only are they no longer unique to the Milky Way, the range of
Physicists have long struggled to explain why the Universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the Universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests
Humans are on track to live and work on the Moon by 2030, a NASA official has said. “We’re going to be sending people down to the surface and they’re going to be living on that surface and doing science,” said Howard Hu, who leads the Orion lunar spacecraft program for NASA, the BBC reported
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