News
- Paleontology
An ancient creature thought to be a teeny dinosaur turns out to be a lizard
CT scans of hummingbird-sized specimens trapped in amber reveal that the 99-million-year-old fossils have a number of lizardlike features.
- Physics
Gravitational waves confirm a black hole law predicted by Stephen Hawking
The first black hole merger detected by LIGO affirms that the surface area of a black hole can increase over time, but not decrease.
- Space
Most planets on tilted orbits pass over the poles of their suns
Nearly all of the worlds on misaligned trajectories in other solar systems orbit at nearly 90 degrees to their stars’ equators.
- Animals
Mouse sperm thrived despite six years of exposure to space radiation
A space station experiment suggests future deep-space explorers don’t need to worry about passing the effects of space radiation on to their children.
- Health & Medicine
Here’s what you should know about COVID-19 vaccine booster shots
No one knows if coronavirus booster shots will be necessary. But researchers are working on figuring that out.
- Astronomy
An arc of galaxies 3 billion light-years long may challenge cosmology
Dubbed “the Giant Arc,” the purported structure is much larger than expected in a cosmos where matter is thought to be evenly distributed.
- Earth
Scientists have found the origins of a mysterious, deadly flood in India
A landslide of rock and ice caused the deadly flood that washed out two hydroelectric power plants in an Indian Himalayan state in February.
- Particle Physics
Physicists dream big with an idea for a particle collider on the moon
A lunar particle collider that dwarfs any such facility on Earth might not be impossible, according to new calculations.
- Archaeology
New clues suggest people reached the Americas around 30,000 years ago
Ancient rabbit bones from a Mexican rock-shelter point to humans arriving on the continent as much as 10,000 years earlier than often assumed.
- Neuroscience
A deep look at a speck of human brain reveals never-before-seen quirks
Three-dimensional views of 50,000 cells from a woman’s brain yield one of the most detailed maps yet.
- Animals
The mere sight of illness may kick-start a canary’s immune system
Healthy canaries ramp up their immune systems when exposed to visibly sick birds, without actually being infected themselves.
- Physics
Auroras form when electrons from space ride waves in Earth’s magnetic field
New lab results confirm that auroras are triggered by disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field called Alfvén waves.
