There are no surviving members of an ancient and mysterious group of people who lived in North America for millennia. Until now, scientists thought they had vanished without a trace. But new research shows that this paleo group’s genes live on today in several indigenous cultures. The finding is surprising, as other studies had found …
Continue reading “These First Americans Vanished Without a Trace — But Hints of Them Linger”
One night about 60 years ago, physicist Enrico Fermi looked up into the sky and asked, “Where is everybody?” He was talking about aliens. Today, scientists know that there are millions, perhaps billions of planets in the universe that could sustain life. So, in the long history of everything, why hasn’t any of this life made it …
On the big roadmap of the universe, bustling clusters of galaxies are connected by long highways of plasma weaving around the wilderness of empty space. These interspace roadways are known as filaments, and they can stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years, populated only by dust, gas and busy electrons driving very close to the universal …
When a seemingly innocuous image of a woodpecker stashing away its acorn supply made the internet rounds, Twitter-users expressed revulsion. They weren’t reacting to the bird or the actual acorns, but to the set of holes in which the bird was storing its treasure. Clustered in an irregular pattern, the holes were triggering a condition …
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No wonder this fish looks like a grumpy, inflated balloon — it’s been holding onto a mouthful of water for ages. This odd little creature is known as the coffinfish (Chaunax endeavouri), and it lives in the deepest parts of the Pacific ocean. Researchers observed this “breath-holding” behavior for the first time while combing through publicly …
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If dark matter is made from WIMPs, they should be all around us, invisible and barely detectable. So why haven’t we found any yet? While they wouldn’t interact with ordinary matter very much, there is always some slight chance that a dark-matter particle could hit a normal particle like a proton or electron as it …
In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in a distant cluster were orbiting one another much faster than they should have been given the amount of visible mass they had. He proposed than an unseen substance, which he called dark matter, might be tugging gravitationally on these galaxies. Since then, …
Continue reading “Today’s Discussion:What’s Dark Matter Web”
In 1925, Einstein went on a walk with a young student named Esther Salaman. As they wandered, he shared his core guiding intellectual principle: “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest …
Continue reading “It Could Be Thousands of Years Before Physicists Devise a Theory of Everything”
Since January, more than 70 dead gray whales have washed up on the coasts of California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Canada. That’s the most in a single year since 2000, and scientists are concerned.Advertisement Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries designated these strandings as part of an Unusual Mortality Event (UME). Under the …
Continue reading “More Than 70 Gray Whales Dead in 6 Months, and Scientists Don’t Understand Why”
Meteorites crash into Earth pretty much constantly, and you can find their ancient remains everywhere from King Tut’s tomb to some guy’s farm in Edmore, Michigan. But to best understand where these space rocks came from and how long they’ve been living as earthly expats, it helps to visit the densest collection of meteorites on the planet — and …
Continue reading “Earth’s Oldest Meteorite Collection Just Found in the Driest Place on the Planet”
In the new HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” Russian scientists uncover the reason for an explosion in Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which spewed radioactive material across northern Europe. That reactor, a design called the RBMK-1000, was discovered to be fundamentally flawed after the Chernobyl accident. And yet there are still 10 of the same …
Just like a human, a Jurassic-period dinosaur used all four limbs to get around as an infant. But later, it switched to two legs. The quadrupedal to bipedal switch made by this sauropodomorph — a type of herbivorous, long-necked and long-tailed dinosaur — appears to be unique among the animal kingdom.Advertisement “We cannot find any living animals, …
Continue reading “No, That Baby Dinosaur Didn’t Crawl. But It Did Walk on 4 Legs As an Infant.”
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