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Megalolamna paradoxodon: Paleontologists Uncover New Species of Prehistoric Shark

Oct 3, 2016 by News Staff

Fossilized teeth from a newly identified species of extinct shark that lived 20 million years ago (early Miocene) were found in the mid-latitudinal zones along the Pacific (Japan, California, and Peru) and western Atlantic (North Carolina) coasts. Megalolamna paradoxodon lived in the same oceans megatoothed sharks inhabited. Image credit: Kenshu Shimada / DePaul Univedrsity. The new fossil shark, named Megalolamna paradoxodon, belongs to a group called...

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Farewell, Rosetta! ESA’s Spacecraft Crashes into Comet

Sep 30, 2016 by News Staff

ESA’s Rosetta mission has concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. An artist’s impression of Rosetta...

Rosetta orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image credit: ESA / AOES Medialab.

ESA’s Rosetta Orbiter to Crash Land into Comet: Watch Live

Sep 29, 2016 by Enrico de Lazaro

Rosetta orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image credit: ESA / AOES Medialab. ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft is set to complete its mission in a controlled...

Mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars projected into point perspective, a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft. The distance is 1,550 miles (2,500 km) from the surface of the planet. The mosaic is composed of 102 Viking Orbiter images of Mars. The center of the scene shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 1,240 miles (2,000 km) long and up to 5 miles (8 km) deep, extending form Noctis Labyrinthus, the arcuate system of graben to the west, to the chaotic terrain to the east. Many huge ancient river channels begin from the chaotic terrain from north-central canyons and run north. The three Tharsis volcanoes (dark red spots), each about 15.5 miles (25 km) high, are visible to the west. South of Valles Marineris is very ancient terrain covered by many impact craters. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Marsquakes Could Support Life Deep within the Red Planet

Sep 28, 2016 by James Romero

The combination of seismic activity and water locked away at depth within Mars could be releasing sufficient hydrogen gas to support communities of microorganisms,...

An artistic life reconstruction of Rativates evadens in the paleoenvironment of the Late Cretaceous of Alberta. Image credit: Andrey-Atuchin.

Rativates evadens: New Ostrich-Mimic Dinosaur Species Identified

Sep 28, 2016 by News Staff

An international team of paleontologists, led by Carleton University researcher Bradley McFeeters, has added another ornithomimid dinosaur to the prehistoric...

The team has identified fossil proteins in 3.8 million year-old ostrich eggshells. Image credit: Matthew Collins.

Researchers Find Ancient Proteins in 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Eggshells

Sep 27, 2016 by News Staff

A multinational team of researchers has uncovered fossil proteins dating back 3.8 million years — a discovery that will enhance future understanding...

The surface of Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view; image scale is 1.6 km per pixel; north on Europa is at right. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute.

Hubble Space Telescope Directly Images Possible Water Plumes on Europa

Sep 26, 2016 by News Staff

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Europa, the sixth-closest moon of Jupiter and...

Universe is Expanding Uniformly, Scientists Say

Sep 23, 2016 by News Staff

The Universe is not spinning or stretched in any particular direction, according to a team of researchers from University College London and Imperial College...

Astronomers Confirm Existence of Giant Circumbinary Exoplanet 8,000 Light-Years Away

Sep 22, 2016 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the existence of a Saturn-mass exoplanet in the binary system OGLE-2007-BLG-349L,...

Depiction of the Jarijari (Nyeri Nyeri) people near Merbein engaged in recreational activities, including a type of Aboriginal football, by William Blandowski & Gustav Mützel, 1857.

Unprecedented Genomic Study Shines Light on Ancestry of Indigenous Australians

Sep 22, 2016 by News Staff

The first comprehensive genomic study of Indigenous Australians has revealed that they are indeed the direct descendants of Australia’s earliest settlers...

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Underwater Archaeologists Find Ancient Human Skeleton in Antikythera Shipwreck

Sep 21, 2016 by News Staff

An international group of archaeologists led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports has discovered...

This image shows the Lyman-alpha blob LAB-1. This picture is a composite of two different images taken with the FORS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope - a wider image showing the surrounding galaxies and a much deeper observation of the blob itself at the center made to detect its polarization. The intense Lyman-alpha ultraviolet radiation from LAB-1 appears green after it has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe during its long journey to Earth. These new observations show for the first time that the light from this object is polarized. This means that the giant ‘blob’ must be powered by galaxies embedded within the cloud. Image credit: M. Hayes / ESO.

Astronomers Unravel Mystery of Gigantic Lyman-Alpha Blobs

Sep 21, 2016 by News Staff

This image shows the Lyman-alpha blob LAB-1. This picture is a composite of two different images taken with the FORS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope...

Damian Scarf et al. demonstrate that pigeons (Columba livia) trained to discriminate words from non-words picked up on the orthographic properties that define words and used this knowledge to identify words they had never seen before. Image credit: Damian Scarf / University of Otago.

Study: Pigeons Can Learn to Visually Recognize Words

Sep 18, 2016 by News Staff

Pigeons (Columba livia) can learn to distinguish real words from non-words by visually processing their letter combinations, according to a surprising...

ESA Releases Gaia’s Billion-Star Map of Milky Way Galaxy

Sep 15, 2016 by News Staff

On its way to assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of our Galaxy, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft has pinned down the precise position on the sky and...

The first detection of Pluto in X-rays has been made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The main panel in this graphic is an optical image taken from New Horizons on its approach to Pluto, while the inset shows an image of Pluto in X-rays from Chandra. There is a significant difference in scale between the optical and X-ray images. New Horizons made a close flyby of Pluto but Chandra is located near the Earth, so the level of detail visible in the two images is very different. The Chandra image is 180,000 miles across at the distance of Pluto, but the planet is only 1,500 miles across. Pluto is detected in the X-ray image as a point source, showing the sharpest level of detail available for Chandra or any other X-ray observatory. This means that details over scales that are smaller than the X-ray source cannot be seen here. Image credit: X-ray – NASA / CXC / JHUAPL / R.McNutt et al; optical – NASA / JHUAPL.

NASA’s Chandra Observatory Detects X-Rays from Pluto

Sep 14, 2016 by News Staff

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have made the first detections of X-rays from Pluto. This X-ray emission comes from interaction between...

Geographic distribution of the 6,452 word lists analyzed in this study. Colors distinguish different linguistic macroareas, regions with relatively little or no contact between them (but with much internal contact between their populations). These are North America (orange), South America (dark green), Eurasia (blue), Africa (green), Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands (red), and Australia (fuchsia). Image credit: Damián E. Blasi et al.

Unrelated Languages Often Use Same Sounds for Common Objects and Ideas, Research Finds

Sep 13, 2016 by News Staff

A careful statistical examination of words from 6,000+ languages shows that humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter...

Experts Debate Our Duty and Ability to Spread Life around the Cosmos

Sep 9, 2016 by James Romero

The technology to ‘seed’ planets well beyond our solar system with basic life forms, skipping billions of years of evolution on Earth and spreading...

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on the first U.S. mission to sample an asteroid. Image credit: NASA.

OSIRIS-REx Begins Its Journey to Asteroid Bennu

Sep 9, 2016 by News Staff

NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft blasted-off at 7:05 p.m. EDT Thursday...

An artist concept of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Image credit: NASA / Goddard.

NASA Launching Probe to Asteroid Bennu: Watch Live

Sep 8, 2016 by News Staff

An artist concept of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Image credit: NASA / Goddard. NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith...

Rosetta NavCam image taken on 14 March 2015 at 85.7 km from the center of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko; it has been cleaned to remove the more obvious bad pixels and cosmic ray artefacts, and intensities have been scaled. Image credit: ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM / CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.

Rosetta Finds Solid Organic Matter in Dust Particles from 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Sep 8, 2016 by News Staff

ESA’s Rosetta orbiter has made the first unambiguous detection of solid organic matter in dust grains ejected by comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This...

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