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Is Pluto ‘an Agglomeration of a Billion Comets’?

This high-resolution image of Pluto was taken by New Horizons on July 14. Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
May 28, 2018 by News Staff

Planetary researchers working with data from NASA’s New Horizons and ESA’s Rosetta missions have developed a new theory for the formation of the dwarf planet Pluto. Their paper will be published in the October 2018 issue of the journal Icarus (arXiv.org preprint). This high-resolution image of Pluto was taken by New Horizons on July 14. Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues,...

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Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch. Image credit: Jorge A. Gonzalez / Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Paleontologists Discover Fossil of Early Mammal Relative in Utah

May 25, 2018 by News Staff

A team of paleontologists has discovered and described the nearly complete fossilized skull of a previously unknown mammal relative that lived about 130...

Social gathering of six bonobos at San Diego Zoo. Image credit: William H. Calvin, University of Washington / CC BY-SA 4.0.

First Detailed Anatomical Study of Bonobos Contradicts Key Dogmas about Human Evolution

May 24, 2018 by News Staff

Bonobos (Pan paniscus) and other apes, such as common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and gorillas (Gorilla sp.), have muscles long-believed to be only...

The Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis). Image credit: Andrew Walmsley.

Tapanuli Orangutan, Marsupial Lion and Mariana Snailfish among ESF’s Top Ten Species of 2017

May 23, 2018 by News Staff

A rare species of orangutan, a majestic tree, a beetle that looks like part of an ant, the world’s deepest-living fish, and the fossil of a marsupial...

An artist’s impression of a rocky asteroid. Image credit: Mark A. Garlick, Space-art.co.uk / University of Warwick / University of Cambridge.

Asteroid 2015 BZ509 Came from Interstellar Space 4.5 Billion Years Ago

May 22, 2018 by News Staff

2015 BZ509, an object in Jupiter’s co-orbital region with a retrograde motion around the Sun, is the first known asteroid to have been captured from...

A spectral tarsier (Tarsius tarsier) feeding on a grasshopper in Tangkoko National Park, Northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. Tarsiers have five chitinase genes to digest the high amount of chitin in their insectivorous diet, which likely represents the ancestral condition of all placental animals, including humans. Image credit: Quentin Martinez / University of California, Berkeley.

Common Ancestor of All Placental Mammals Was Insect-Eater: Study

May 21, 2018 by News Staff

Humans are known to have one functioning and three non-functioning chitinase genes — those that make an enzyme that digests the insect exoskeletal...

Lipson et al identify at least three major waves of human migration into Southeast Asia over the last 50,000 years.

Ancient DNA Study Reveals Prehistory of Southeast Asia

May 21, 2018 by News Staff

The first whole-genome analysis of ancient human DNA from Southeast Asia, defined as the area east of India and south of China, identifies at least three...

Prasinohaema prehensicauda, a green-blooded lizard with high concentrations of biliverdin, a toxic green bile pigment. Image credit: Chris Austin, Louisiana State University.

Scientists Find Four Lineages of Green-Blooded Lizards in New Guinea

May 18, 2018 by News Staff

Several species of skinks (a type of lizard) from the island of New Guinea have lime-green colored blood — which in turn results in bright green...

Astronomers Find Evidence for Stars Forming Only 250 Million Years after Big Bang

May 17, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has used observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array...

A reconstruction of Homo naledi’s head by paleoartist John Gurche, who spent some 700 hours recreating the head from bone scans. The find was announced by the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society and the South African National Research Foundation and published in the journal eLife. Image credit: John Gurche / Mark Thiessen / National Geographic.

Homo naledi Had Small but Surprisingly Complex Brain

May 16, 2018 by News Staff

A species of extinct hominin called Homo naledi was discovered in 2013 in a remote cave chamber of the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. This species...

Artist’s illustration of Jupiter and Europa with NASA’s Galileo spacecraft after its pass through a plume erupting from Europa’s surface. A new computer simulation gives us an idea of how the magnetic field interacted with a plume. The magnetic field lines (depicted in blue) show how the plume interacts with the ambient flow of Jovian plasma. The red colors on the lines show more dense areas of plasma. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Michigan.

Archival Data from NASA’s Galileo Mission Yield New Evidence of Water Plumes on Europa

May 15, 2018 by News Staff

A new analysis of data collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1997 has found strong evidence that the underground ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa...

Artistic impression of a Multiverse. Image credit: Jaime Salcido / EAGLE Collaboration.

Multiverse Might Not Be as Inhospitable to Life as Previously Thought

May 15, 2018 by News Staff

Questions about whether other universes might exist as part of a larger Multiverse, and if they could harbor life, are burning issues in modern cosmology....

An artist’s impression of Magyarosuchus fitosi. Image credit: Marton Szabo.

Magyarosuchus fitosi: 180 Million-Year-Old Fossil is ‘Missing Link’ in Crocodile Evolution

May 14, 2018 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists have discovered a fossil of a 180-million-year-old crocodyliform that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some ancient...

NGC 1032. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.

Hubble Space Telescope Spies Spiral Galaxy Edge-On

May 14, 2018 by Enrico de Lazaro

A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 1032, a spiral galaxy seen almost edge-on. NGC 1032. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble. NGC...

A life-like reconstruction of Llanocetus denticrenatus. Image credit: Carl Buell.

Earliest ‘Baleen Whales’ Had Large Teeth and Gums

May 11, 2018 by News Staff

The discovery of Llanocetus denticrenatus — an ancient whale species that swam in Antarctic waters 34 million years ago, during a period called the...

3,250-year-old cuneiform tablets were found inside a clay vessel at the archaeological site of Bassetki in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Image credit: Peter Pfälzner, University of Tübingen.

Assyrian Clay Tablets Found in Iraq Reveal Location of Lost Ancient City of Mardama

May 11, 2018 by News Staff

A team of archaeologists and philologists from the Universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg, Germany, has identified the location of the ancient royal...

Our planet is surrounded by the magnetosphere, shown here in blue. As charged particles from the Sun flow around the Earth’s magnetosphere, it forms the magnetosheath, shown in yellow. Image credit: Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

NASA’s MMS Mission Discovers New Magnetic Process in Earth’s Magnetosheath Region

May 10, 2018 by News Staff

Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, which deflects a supersonic stream of charged particles from the Sun, known...

This artist’s impression shows 2004 EW95, the first carbon-rich asteroid confirmed to exist in the Kuiper Belt and a relic of the primordial Solar System. 2004 EW95 likely formed in the main asteroid belt and has been flung billions of miles from its origin to its current home in the Kuiper Belt. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.

Astronomers Find First Carbon-Rich Asteroid in Kuiper Belt: 2004 EW95

May 9, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has found that a small Kuiper Belt object called 2004 EW95 is a carbonaceous (carbon-rich) asteroid — the first...

Gravity of Venus and Jupiter Elongates Earth’s Orbit Every 405,000 Years

May 8, 2018 by News Staff

A research team led by Rutgers University’s Professor Dennis Kent has documented a gradual shift in Earth’s orbit that repeats regularly every 405,000...

An archaic hominin. Image credit: Ninara / CC BY 2.0.

Archaic Hominins Arrived in Philippines as Early as 700,000 Years Ago

May 7, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of scientists has unearthed 57 stone tools and butchered animal bones at Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon, the largest...

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