Lingwulong shenqi, a newly described, 174-million-year-old dinosaur, is more than just another giant herbivore to add to the fossil record. Its age and location are unexpected, and upset notions about dino diversity and distribution during the Jurassic Period. Lingwulong's name translates as "the amazing dragon of Lingwu," the region in northwestern China where multiple specimens have been excavated over the past 13 years. I'll be honest with you ...read more

I don't know about you, but nothing wakes me up in the morning quite like an announcement from a peer-reviewed journal declaring that paleontologists have found Bigfoot in the Black Hills region of the U.S. Sooooo...yeah. Not quite. But they are claiming the dinosaur foot they found belonged to the biggest dino ever — which they nicknamed "Bigfoot." Sneaky clickbait? Sure. But also some interesting science. Read on: The game is afoot. The new study's title actually kicks of ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. Many of us may be considering “burning some fat� so we feel better in our bathing suits out on the beach or at the pool. What does that actually mean, though? The normal fat cell exists primarily to store energy. The body will expand the number of fat cells and the size of fat cells to accommodate excess energy from high-calorie foods. It will even go so far as to start depositing fat cell ...read more

You may have heard about California's Ferguson Fire, which has killed one firefighter and is threatening to spread into Yosemite National Park. But a series of other fires, sparked by lighting to the north, are also raging. And now, thousands of firefighters struggling to contain the blazes must contend with a heat wave descending on the region. In the image above, acquired today (Monday, July 23) by NASA's Terra satellite, look for a thick pall of smoke in ...read more

NASA is about to make it a little easier to check your Instagram in zero gravity. Two teams, Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations, are working together to finally make interplanetary internet a thing. Previous efforts to bring WiFi throughout the solar system haven’t always been successful, but this time, it could become reality. It will work using something called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, which is pretty similar to the internet you& ...read more

Today, the moon is about as inhospitable to life as it gets. The little water that’s there is trapped in ice or rock. It’s otherwise dry and airless, fluctuating in temperature by hundreds of degrees anywhere the sun shines. But long ago? That’s an entirely different story. New research published in Astrobiology suggests that the moon may have been shockingly habitable in the past during at least two periods — shortly a ...read more

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the largest member of the Milky Way’s gang of galactic neighbors, known as the Local Group. With around a trillion suns worth of mass, Andromeda’s gravitational influence is a force to be reckoned with. And according to new research, no galaxy in the Local Group knows this better than M32, an oddball satellite galaxy now orbiting Andromeda. In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers showed that about 2 billion ...read more

Sea turtles may be eating themselves to death. In this case, though, the phrase likely doesn’t mean what you think it does. Green sea turtles in the Caribbean may be in danger of starving to death in the near future thanks to a recent invasion of seagrass. The marine plant is spreading quickly and edging out native species helped, ironically, by the sea turtles themselves. Underwater Gardens Green sea turtles forage in beds of seagrass, an abundant resource in their underwate ...read more

By the end of the century, rising CO2 levels will cut fishes’ sense of smell by nearly half, new research finds. And the impaired olfaction will threaten marine ecosystems and our food supply. That’s according to a report Monday in Nature Climate Change. Fish need a sharp smelling sense because many species spawn offshore, forcing newly hatched fish to find their way home by following their noses. Smell also helps fish locate food, communicate with their pa ...read more

As the climate warms, seas will rise, storms will proliferate and cities will bake. But, in addition to the marquee issues global warming causes, there will likely be a host of tangential issues, many of which we may not anticipate. A new study in Nature Climate Change looks at the psychological effects a warming climate will have on humans, focusing specifically on mental health. Though the work is somewhat preliminary, the authors pick out a broad trend of ...read more