Featured News

May 10, 2019 by News Staff

New data from Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes show that in a few specific wavelengths of infrared light, some of the first galaxies to form in the Universe, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, were considerably brighter than astronomers anticipated. This artist’s illustration shows what one of the very first galaxies in the Universe might have looked like. Image credit: James Josephides, Swinburne Astronomy Productions. No one knows...

May 9, 2019 by Enrico de Lazaro

A previously unknown species of bird-like dinosaur with pterosaur-like wings has been discovered by a team of paleontologists working with the Institute...

May 8, 2019 by News Staff

On April 25 and 26, 2019, NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European-based Virgo detector registered two new gravitational...

May 7, 2019 by Enrico de Lazaro

A new species of predatory tyrannosauroid dinosaur that lived about 92 million years ago (Cretaceous period) has been identified from fossils found in...

May 7, 2019 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has discovered that all songbirds have an additional chromosome in their germ cells — the ‘germline restricted...

May 5, 2019 by News Staff

According to new research, a nearby binary neutron-star merger gave birth to 0.3% of the Earth’s heaviest elements, including gold, platinum and uranium;...

May 3, 2019 by News Staff

Giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) feed almost exclusively on highly fibrous bamboo, yet they bear a mix of herbivore and carnivore traits. A new study...

May 3, 2019 by News Staff

A duo of researchers from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University has made the first-ever measurements of ancient water contained...

May 2, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers have produced the largest, most comprehensive ‘history book’ of galaxies in the Universe, using 16 years’ worth of observations from...

May 2, 2019 by Enrico de Lazaro

In 1980, a Buddhist monk found the right half a fossilized hominin jawbone in Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau, Xiahe, China. An analysis of...

May 1, 2019 by News Staff

Scientists say they have discovered an antidote to the sting delivered by the box jellyfish Chironex fleckeri, which is considered to be one of the most...

May 1, 2019 by News Staff

A team of planetary researchers from the United States, Canada and Italy has detected an ice-rich linear feature of bedrock in the tropical region of Saturn’s...

Apr 30, 2019 by News Staff

The banded tube-dwelling anemone (Isarachnanthus nocturnes), a sea creature that resembles a prehistoric flower, now holds the record for the largest mitochondrial...

Apr 30, 2019 by News Staff

Professor Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues have proposed a new test for inflation, the theory that our Universe...

Apr 29, 2019 by News Staff

STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) is a thin ribbon of pinkish-red or mauve-colored light stretching from east to west, farther south...

Apr 26, 2019 by News Staff

The half-life of a process is the time after which half of the radioactive nuclei present in a sample have decayed away. Using the XENON1T dark-matter...

Apr 26, 2019 by News Staff

Measurements of today’s expansion rate do not match the rate that was expected based on how the Universe appeared shortly after the Big Bang over 13...

Apr 25, 2019 by News Staff

An international team of paleontologists has found the exceptionally preserved fossilized remains of an enigmatic new type of crab, Callichimaera perplexa,...

Apr 25, 2019 by News Staff

Two new species of the bird genus Zosterops (white-eyes) have been discovered in the forests of the Wakatobi Archipelago, Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Wakatobi...

Apr 24, 2019 by News Staff

Functional olfactory receptors — the sensors that detect odors in the nose — are also present in taste cells found on the human tongue, according...