Gliese 523b (GJ 523b) is a young, ultra-dense planet that orbits almost perpendicular to its star’s spin, according to a team of U.S. astronomers. An artist’s impression of a giant exoplanet. Image credit: Sci.News. “People have been using the phrase ‘mega-Earth’ for more than a decade, but we’ve never had a planet that let us say concretely what one is,” said Dr. Thomas Beatty, an...

New simulations suggest supernova explosions of the Universe’s first stars scattered the ingredients for rocky planets only 100 million years after the Big Bang, with water already present in some planet-forming disks. This artist’s impression shows a field of Population III stars as they would have appeared a mere 100 million years after the Big Bang. Image credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J....

Archaeologists in southwestern Germany have unearthed two miniature bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory, among the smallest and most delicate examples of Ice Age art ever found. Two bird figurines found at Hohle Fels Cave in Germany. Image credit: Ralf Ehmann / University of Tübingen / Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art. The two ancient figurines, roughly 2 cm (0.8 inches) long and weighing...

A fossilized bone unearthed two decades ago in northeastern Japan belongs to one of the smallest iguanodontian dinosaurs ever found in the country’s Cretaceous marine rocks, according to new research led by the University of Tsukuba. Reconstruction of the iguanodontian dinosaur from the Ashizawa Formation in Japan; the red bone is the right sternal. Image credit: Masato Hattori. “Iguanodontia...

For nearly 110 years, biologists have puzzled over why domestic cats’ kidneys are packed with unusually large numbers of fat-storing structures called lipid droplets. Professor Masao Miyazaki of Iwate University and colleagues suggest that these kidney droplets serve as a chemical reservoir, helping cats maintain a stable ‘scent signature’ in their urine even as the odor changes over time. Animals...

For decades, physicists have puzzled over a deceptively simple question: how does a proton carry its baryon number, the quantum property that marks it as matter rather than antimatter? According to a new paper by researchers with the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the baryon number appears to be carried not by the proton’s three quarks alone, but by the web of gluons...

Researchers at King’s College London have identified a surprising new therapeutic mechanism for a type of heart failure called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), a condition that affects nearly half of all heart failure patients and has long resisted effective treatment. Their results show that urolithin A — a compound produced when gut bacteria break down substances...

Neanderthals vanished roughly 42,000 years ago, but a piece of their biology appears to be quietly at work in some people today, according to a new study led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Aspects of Neanderthal anatomy live on in people today. Image credit: Holger Neumann / Neanderthal Museum. “Neanderthals are the most well-known among archaic human...

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;...

Researchers at King’s College London have identified a surprising new therapeutic mechanism for a type of heart failure called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), a condition that affects nearly half of all heart failure patients and has long resisted effective treatment. Their results show that urolithin A — a compound produced when gut bacteria break down substances...