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38,000-Year-Old Decorated Bone from Crimea May Provide Insight into Neanderthal Cognition

The raven bone fragment from the Zaskalnaya VI rock shelter. Scale bar - 1 cm. Image credit: A. Majkic et al, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0173435.
Mar 31, 2017 by News Staff

Neanderthals’ cognitive abilities are a hotly debated topic, but a bird bone fragment found at a Middle Paleolithic site in Crimea, Ukraine, features two notches that may have been made by our extinct cousins intentionally to display a visually consistent pattern, according to a new study. The raven bone fragment from the Zaskalnaya VI rock shelter. Scale bar – 1 cm. Image credit: A. Majkic et al, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0173435. The bone...

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World’s First Glow-In-The-Dark Frog Found in Argentina

Mar 30, 2017 by Maria Gabriela Lagorio, University of Buenos Aires

Scientists in Argentina have discovered a frog that glows in moonlight and at twilight. Fluorescence in terrestrial environments had previously only been...

An artist’s rendering of the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Image credit: Benjamin de Bivort, debivort.org / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Titan Has ‘Electrically-Charged’ Hydrocarbon Sands

Mar 29, 2017 by News Staff

Low-density organic granules that cover the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan are ‘electrically charged,’ according to new experiments done by scientists...

Dinosaur tracks in the Walmadany area, Western Australia. Image credit: Steve Salisbury.

World’s Most Diverse Collection of Dinosaur Footprints Unveiled

Mar 29, 2017 by Natali Anderson

A group of paleontologists from the University of Queensland and James Cook University has documented the most diverse assemblage of dinosaur tracks in...

Artist’s impression of a galaxy forming stars within powerful outflows of material blasted out from supermassive black holes at its core. Image credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser.

ESO’s Very Large Telescope Spots New Type of Star Formation

Mar 27, 2017 by News Staff

New observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope have revealed stars forming in the powerful outflows in galaxies, which are driven by central supermassive...

Visualization of resident megakaryocytes in the lungs. Image credit: Emma Lefrançais et al, doi: 10.1038/nature21706.

Lungs Play Previously Unknown Role in Blood Production

Mar 27, 2017 by News Staff

Using video microscopy in a living mouse lung, a team of researchers at the Universities of California, San Francisco (UCSF) & Los Angeles (UCLA),...

This artist’s impression displays TRAPPIST-1 and its planets reflected in a surface. Image credit: NASA / R. Hurt / T. Pyle.

TRAPPIST-1 System Ideal for Planet-Hopping Life?

Mar 24, 2017 by James Romero

Exoplanet hunters struck gold earlier this year with the discovery of seven rocky bodies orbiting around dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, a find that both raised...

Showcase of the different types of changes identified in high-resolution images of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko during more than two years of monitoring by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft. The approximate locations of each feature are marked on the central context images. Dates of when the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images were taken are also indicated. Note that the orientation and resolution between image pairs may vary, therefore in each image set arrows point to the location of the changes, for guidance. Image credit: ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM / MPS for OSIRIS Team / MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Spectacular Changes Spotted on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Mar 22, 2017 by News Staff

A study published this week in the journal Science summarizes the types of surface changes — including the growing fractures, collapsing cliffs,...

Torvosaurus gurneyi. Image credit: © Sergey Krasovskiy.

Paleontologists Redraw Dinosaur Family Tree

Mar 22, 2017 by News Staff

A team of paleontologists from the University of Cambridge and the Natural History Museum, London, UK, has proposed radical changes to the dinosaur family...

A broad plume of dust is imaged by Rosetta’s navigation camera on July 10, 2015, which can be traced back to an area on the comet that encompasses the Seth region; the Aswan cliff is included within the marked rectangle. Image credit: ESA / Rosetta / NavCam / MPS / MPS for OSIRIS Team / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA / CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.

Collapsing Cliff Reveals Pristine Interior of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Mar 22, 2017 by News Staff

In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers make the first definitive link between an outburst of dust and gas from the nucleus of...

Tsimane village from the water. Image credit: Hillard Kaplan et al.

Bolivian Tsimane People Have World’s Healthiest Arteries, Study Says

Mar 20, 2017 by News Staff

According to a new study published in The Lancet, the Tsimane (pronounced chee-MAH-nay) — an indigenous people of lowland Bolivia — have the...

The Tatama tapaculo (Scytalopus alvarezlopezi) upon capture at Cerro Montezuma, Risaralda department, Colombia, April 2, 2015. Image credit: Julian Heavyside, doi: 10.1642/AUK-16-205.1.

Tatama Tapaculo: New Bird Species Discovered in Colombia

Mar 20, 2017 by Sergio Prostak

A new species of tapaculo — called the Tatama tapaculo (Scytalopus alvarezlopezi) — has been discovered in the cloud forests of Colombia’s...

An artistic conception of the early Earth. Image credit: Simone Marchi / NASA.

Geologists Find Remnants of Early Earth’s Crust in Canada

Mar 17, 2017 by News Staff

An analysis of rock samples collected from the Superior Province, the region in Canada just north of the Great Lakes, suggests the samples contain components...

This enhanced-color view of Enceladus is largely of the southern hemisphere and includes the south polar terrain at the bottom of the image. Ancient craters remain somewhat pristine in some locales, but have clearly relaxed in others. Northward-trending fractures, likely caused by a change in the moon’s rate of rotation and the consequent flattening of the moon’s shape, rip across the southern hemisphere. The south polar terrain is marked by a striking set of ‘blue’ fractures and encircled by a conspicuous and continuous chain of folds and ridges, testament to the forces within Enceladus that have yet to be silenced. The mosaic was created from 21 false-color frames taken during Cassini’s close approaches to Enceladus on March 9 and July 14, 2005. Images taken using filters sensitive to UV, visible and IR light (spanning wavelengths from 338 to 930 nm) were combined to create the individual frames. Image credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute.

Cassini Spots Anomalously Warm Subsurface Region on Enceladus

Mar 16, 2017 by News Staff

A new study, based on microwave observations by NASA’s Cassini orbiter, shows that the south polar region of Saturn’s frozen moon Enceladus is warmer...

Study: Spiders Eat 400-800 Million Tons of Insects and Other Prey Annually

Mar 15, 2017 by News Staff

According to a new study published in The Science of Nature, the annual prey kill of the global spider community is in the range of 400-800 million metric...

World’s Oldest Red Algae Fossils Found

Mar 15, 2017 by Natali Anderson

An international team of paleontologists from the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution and the Swedish Museum of Natural History has unearthed uniquely well-preserved...

An artist’s impression of a white dwarf star (left) in orbit around a black hole and so close that much of its material is being pulled away. There is a hotspot where the gas from the white dwarf hits the disc of matter swirling around the black hole. The black hole itself is surrounded by a cloud of ionized gas, which contains large amounts of oxygen. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss.

Astronomers Find Record-Breaking White-Dwarf-Black-Hole Binary in Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae

Mar 14, 2017 by News Staff

Using data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NuSTAR telescope, a team of astronomers has found evidence...

Archean Earth. Image credit: Francis Reddy, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Scientists Propose New Contributing Cause for ‘Great Oxidation Event’

Mar 14, 2017 by News Staff

In the Archean Eon, more than 2.3 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere spent about a million years filled with a methane-rich haze; and this haze drove...

The massive black hole shown at left in this drawing is able to rapidly grow as intense radiation from a galaxy nearby shuts down star formation in its host galaxy. Image credit: John Wise, Georgia Tech.

How Universe’s First Supermassive Black Holes Were Born

Mar 13, 2017 by News Staff

An international team of astrophysicists from the United States, Ireland and Finland has come up with the formula for the formation of the first supermassive...

Could Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Be Powering Extragalactic Light Sails?

Mar 12, 2017 by News Staff

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) — powerful radio flashes lasting just milliseconds, with mysterious origins that continue to be a matter of debate —...

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