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Ancient Cholesterol Confirms Dickinsonia as One of Earth’s First Animals

Dickinsonia, which lived more than 550 million years ago, were flat, soft-bodied creatures that moved along the sea bed to eat microbes and algae. Image credit: University of California, Riverside.
Sep 21, 2018 by News Staff

The first complex organisms emerged during the Ediacaran period (635-541 million years ago). Ediacaran fossils are as ‘strange as life on another planet’ and have evaded taxonomic classification, with interpretations ranging from marine animals or giant single-celled protists to lichens. Fossils of one of these creatures — a flat, oval-shaped organism called Dickinsonia — have been particularly difficult to classify. Now, researchers...

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Neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars in the Universe. True to their name, neutron stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons. Duer et al suggest that some properties of neutron stars may be influenced not only by their multitude of densely packed neutrons, but also by a substantially smaller fraction of protons -- positively charged particles that make up just 5% of a neutron star. This is an illustration of a neutron star. Image credit: Casey Reed, Penn State University.

Nuclear Pasta: Exotic Substance in Neutron Stars’ Crust May Be Universe’s Strongest Material

Sep 19, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of researchers from McGill University, California Institute of Technology and Indiana University has calculated the strength of nuclear...

Gerlach et al determine four new personality types: average, reserved, self-centered and role model. Image credit: GraphicMama Team / Sci-News.com.

Researchers Determine Four New Personality Types

Sep 19, 2018 by News Staff

A team of researchers at Northwestern University has sifted through data from more than 1.5 million people around the world and found at least four distinct...

Archaeologist Dr. Marcello Canuto sits beside the ancient Maya altar he and his colleagues discovered in the jungles of northern Guatemala. Image credit: National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Guatemala City / La Corona Regional Archaeological Project.

Archaeologists Uncover 1,500-Year-Old Maya Altar in Guatemala

Sep 18, 2018 by News Staff

An international group of archaeologists has found a carved limestone altar at the Maya site of La Corona, located in jungle forest of the Petén in Guatemala. Archaeologist...

This image shows RX J0806.4-4123 with a disk of warm dust that produces an infrared signature as detected by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Nahks Tr’Ehnl, Pennsylvania State University.

Hubble Detects Unusual Infrared Emission from Nearby Neutron Star

Sep 18, 2018 by News Staff

An unusual infrared emission from the neutron star RX J0806.4-4123 detected by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope could indicate new features never before...

Aspirin is a well-established therapy for the secondary prevention of cardiovascular events. However, its role in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease is unclear, especially in older persons, who have an increased risk. Image credit: Steve Buissinne.

Daily Low-Dose Aspirin Has No Effect on Healthy Life Span in Older Adults, Study Shows

Sep 18, 2018 by News Staff

According to the findings from the ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly (ASPREE) study, taking a low-dose aspirin daily does not prolong healthy living...

The puma (Puma concolor). Image credit: Jbarreirol / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ancient Maya Captured and Traded Big Cats: Study

Sep 17, 2018 by News Staff

The ancient Maya routinely captured and traded wild jaguars (Panthera onca) and pumas (Puma concolor) for symbolic and ritual purposes, according to an...

Zhang et al used artificial intelligence to search through radio signals recorded from FRB 121102. Image credit: Breakthrough Listen Initiative.

AI Helps Astronomers Detect New Pulses from Mysterious Repeating Radio Source

Sep 14, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers at Breakthrough Listen, a scientific program in search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe, have applied machine-learning techniques...

Image of the Blombos Cave silcrete flake displaying the drawn lines that form a cross-hatched pattern. Image credit: C. Foster.

Earliest Known Drawing by Human Discovered in South Africa

Sep 14, 2018 by News Staff

A cross-hatched pattern drawn with an ochre crayon on a small piece of siliceous rock (silcrete) is 73,000 years old. It pre-dates the earliest previously...

The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica shows the continent in stunning detail. Image credit: National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

New High-Resolution Map of Antarctica Unveiled

Sep 13, 2018 by News Staff

A team of cartographers and researchers from the University of Minnesota and the Ohio State University has produced a high-resolution terrain map of Antarctica...

Astronomers Find Two-Planet System in Beehive Cluster

Sep 11, 2018 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using data from the Kepler spacecraft’s K2 mission have discovered two mini-Neptune exoplanets orbiting a star in an open star cluster called...

This Pluto mosaic was made from New Horizons LORRI images taken on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 49,700 miles (80,000 km). This view is projected from a point 1,118 miles (1,800 km) above Pluto’s equator, looking northeast over the dark, cratered Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth expanse of icy plains called Sputnik Planum. Pluto’s North Pole is off the image to the left. This mosaic was produced with panchromatic images from the New Horizons LORRI camera, with color overlaid from the Ralph color mapper onboard New Horizons. Image credit: S.A. Stern et al.

Researchers Say the Reason Pluto Lost Its Planet Status is Not Valid

Sep 10, 2018 by News Staff

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established a definition of a planet that required it to clear its orbit, or in other words, be the...

Pottery Analysis Reveals Earliest Mediterranean Cheese Production 7,200 Years Ago

Sep 7, 2018 by News Staff

An analysis of fatty residue in pottery from two Neolithic archaeological sites in Croatia has revealed evidence of fermented dairy products (soft cheeses...

New data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal the presence of very bright X-ray sources, most likely binary systems powered by either a stellar-mass black hole or neutron star, in the remarkable ring of the galaxy AM 0644-741. In this composite image, X-rays from Chandra (purple) have been combined with optical data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, and blue). Image credit: X-ray – NASA / CXC / INAF / A. Wolter et al; optical – NASA / STScI.

Chandra X-ray Observatory Discovers Ring of Dense Compact Objects in Distant Galaxy

Sep 7, 2018 by News Staff

A remarkable ring of bright X-ray sources — black holes or neutron stars — has been discovered in a galaxy approximately 300 million light...

Huge Northern Polar Vortex Spotted Forming in Saturn’s Stratosphere

Sep 5, 2018 by News Staff

When NASA’s Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, the gas giant’s southern hemisphere was enjoying summertime, while the northern was in the...

Did Mona Lisa Suffer from Hypothyroidism?

Sep 4, 2018 by News Staff

In a paper published in the September 2018 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Brigham and Women’s Hospital researcher Mandeep Mehra and University...

Wild Bottlenose Dolphins Learn from Each Other to Tail-Walk on Water

Sep 3, 2018 by News Staff

A new paper published in the journal Biology Letters describes how tail walking was learned by a single bottlenose dolphin and then copied by other dolphins...

An artist’s impression of a water-world exoplanet. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Water-World Exoplanets Could Be Friendly to Life

Sep 3, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers have largely assumed that water-world exoplanets would not support the cycling of minerals and gases that keeps the climate stable on Earth,...

The Fiordland penguin (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus). Image credit: University of Otago.

Fiordland Penguins Travel up to 4,350 Miles to Feed: Study

Aug 31, 2018 by News Staff

The Fiordland penguin (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus), the only crested penguin species breeding on the New Zealand mainland, is currently one of the least studied...

This Hubble image is a composite of observations made of Saturn in early 2018 in the optical and of the auroras on Saturn’s north pole region, made in 2017. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / OPAL Team / J. DePasquale, STScI / L. Lamy, Observatoire de Paris.

Hubble Captures Enormous Northern Auroras on Saturn

Aug 31, 2018 by News Staff

Viewing Saturn’s northern polar region for a period of seven months, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space telescope snapped a series of stunning images of auroras...

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