Astronomers using ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) have observed the densest, most crowded regions at the centers of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, our Milky Way Galaxy’s closest dwarf companions, offering an unprecedented look at areas that have long resisted detailed study. This image from ESO’s VISTA telescope shows the Large Magellanic Cloud. Image...

Although the famous Carrington Event of 1859 is often described as the first major space weather event to affect technology, earlier incidents did occur. Historical records show that telegraph systems were disrupted by geomagnetic storms as early as the late 1840s. An anonymous 1871 article in the journal Nature even suggested such an impact happened in 1841, when a railway telegraph system in southern...

Scientists from Curtin University and the University of York have pinpointed the origin of the Devil’s Arrows, the three towering gritstone megaliths that have stood on the edge of Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, for roughly 4,000 years, ending a long-running archaeological debate. The Devil’s Arrows, the three towering gritstone megaliths on the western outskirts of Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, the United...

Paleontologists have described a previously unknown species of mosasaur — a group of extinct marine reptiles that patrolled Cretaceous seas alongside dinosaurs on land — based on fossils unearthed in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis. Halisaurus arambourgi, a species of mosasaur from Late Cretaceous of Marocco. Image credit: DiBgd / CC BY-SA 4.0. Halisaurus auriculatus lived roughly 70 million years...

In experiments in Thailand, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) learned to ignore an enticing but ineffective route to food and quickly adapted when a familiar solution stopped working. Experiment setup: (A) an elephant enters the ‘over’ opening to gain access to food in a familiarization trial; (B) an elephant enters the ‘under’ opening to gain access to food (apple) in a test trial. Image...

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have found evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a ‘virtual’ photon and a real photon, which in turn produces a pair of leptons. This pathway, known as H→γ*γ→llγ, occurs in just one in about 10,000 Higgs decays, making it one of the particle’s most elusive behaviors. Event display of a candidate Higgs...

In a study of 2,266 workers in Finland, evening-type people, or night owls, were up to three times more likely to be treated for depression or anxiety than morning types, with poor work-life balance identified as a key contributing factor. Merikanto et al. showed that evening-types had more issues regarding work spillover to personal life and poor recovery from work and that these factors moderated...

For several decades, paleontologists have described Miracinonyx trumani — an extinct species of cheetah-like felid that roamed the North American prairies and steppe terrains more than 13,000 years ago — as North America’s answer to the African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus). New research led by the University of California, Santa Cruz suggests the picture was largely wrong. Miracinonyx...

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;...

New research led by University of the Witwatersrand and University of Southern California paleoanthropologists sheds more light on one of the most debated transitions in human evolution: when our ancestors stopped regularly climbing trees and committed fully to walking on two legs. A depiction of an early Homo (right) characterized by relatively greater bone strength of the femur in the thigh compared...