Astronomy

Webb Catches Supermassive Black Hole Feeding from Cosmic Gas Streams

This Hubble image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4696. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Fabian.

New images of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4696 from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveal gas filaments funneling material into a spinning disk around a supermassive black hole 800 light-years across, solving a decades-old puzzle of how these giants keep growing. This Hubble image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4696. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Fabian. Nearly every large...

Paleontology

New Crested Dinosaur Species Identified in Canada

Life reconstruction of Plesiolophus warnerensis. Image credit: Connor Ashbridge / CC BY 4.0.

A new genus and species of lambeosaurine hadrosaurid dinosaur has been identified in southern Alberta, Canada, dating back 77 million years to the Campanian age of the Cretaceous period. Life reconstruction of Plesiolophus warnerensis. Image credit: Connor Ashbridge / CC BY 4.0. “Hollow-crested hadrosauroid (duck-billed) dinosaurs belonging to the clade Lambeosaurinae were widely distributed across...

Biology

Bumblebees Display Emotion-Like Reactions to Sweet and Bitter Tastes

Gibbons et al. showed that bumblebees are capable of modifying their response to noxious stimuli in order to get a higher sugar reward. Image credit: Ralphs Fotos.

Slow-motion video reveals that buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) respond to sweet and bitter tastes with distinct, context-dependent behaviors resembling mammalian expressions of pleasure and disgust, adding fresh evidence to the debate over insect consciousness. Zhou et al. show that buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) display analogous orofacial reactions to tastes that reflect...

Geology

Australia’s North Pole Dome Crater is Earth’s Oldest and Only Known Archean Impact Structure

The North Pole Dome crater: (A) simplified map of the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT, Western Australia), showing Paleoarchean granite domes (pink) and greenstone belts (greens and blues); the North Pole Dome (NPD) lies near the terrane center; (B) geological map of the NPD and the shatter-cone field (yellow star); (C) A quartz (Qtz)-carbonate vein cutting shatter-cone lineation. Image credit: Kirkland et al., doi: 10.1130/G54866.1.

Zircon crystals and impact-altered minerals show that a massive asteroid slammed into what is now the Pilbara region of Western Australia about 3 billion years ago. The North Pole Dome crater: (A) simplified map of the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT, Western Australia), showing Paleoarchean granite domes (pink) and greenstone belts (greens and blues); the North Pole Dome (NPD) lies near the terrane center;...