Snakes alive! Preserved in a piece of amber about the size of a small potato, a tiny snake hatchling — less than two inches long — is unprecedented in the fossil record. At nearly 100 million years old, the baby snake's remains provide researchers with significant new information about the animals' development and global distribution. But wait, there's more...
The early Late Cretaceous hatchling, from Myanmar's northern Kachin province, was donated to rese ...read more
A new origami-inspired robotic claw that looks like a cross between a flower and a crab pincer could help marine biologists capture delicate underwater organisms currently unknown to science.
The oceans are the largest and least-explored habitats on Earth, with some estimates suggesting that up to a million unknown species lurk within its deepest waters. Marine biologists typically use submarines or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to grab or scoop life from the seafloor, but plucking se ...read more
We’re not always the same person. The jokes you tell at home aren’t necessarily the ones you tell at work, and I don’t know about you, but I certainly talked differently around my grandmother than I did around my friends. Linguistics people call this tendency code-switching. People are complicated, multi-faceted, and some situations bring out certain qualities in us — it makes sense.
But we’re not the ...read more
Two robots traverse the desert floor. Explosions from a decades-old conflict have left a pockmarked and unstable territory, though many more improvised bombs lie concealed in its vast reaches. Sunlight splays off the beaten edges of Optimus, the smaller robot. Its motors whir as its claw grasps an unusual orb lying by its side. If Optimus were programmed to hope, it would hope the object was just a rock and not another bomb. It couldn’t afford to take many more hits, and its a ...read more
Think back to the earliest memory you have. How old were you? Three, maybe 2? Younger? If it’s the latter, you’re not alone. Problem is, you’re probably imagining it.
Most brain experts agree we’re not really capable of forming full, autobiographical memories until we’re a little more than 3 years old; our brains just aren’t that sophisticated yet. But a new paper published in Psy ...read more
Alexandria, known for its ancient library and a lighthouse counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, just keeps on giving.
The reaction to its latest gift has been bad mummy jokes online.
During a construction survey, a sealed sarcophagus was found in the Egyptian city 16 feet beneath the Sidi Gaber district, according to a news release this month. The tomb is made of black granite, 9 feet long and 5 feet wide, the largest ever discovered in the city.
Mortar seals the ...read more
Most of us think of coffee as a morning essential, not a cancer-causing hazard. So the nation got a jolt after a California judge made a final ruling in May that Starbucks and other coffee sellers must inform customers about carcinogenic chemicals in their brews.
The ruling stemmed from a court case invoking Proposition 65, a state law that requires warnings if products or places contain certain types of hazardous chemicals. But the implications reach far beyond the Golden State. Californ ...read more
Jupiter’s family has really grown since Galileo first recorded its four largest moons in 1610.
On Tuesday, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced the discovery of 10 new moons orbiting Jupiter. Along with two found through the same research project but announced in June 2017, this brings the roster of Jupiter’s known natural satellites to 79.
One of these new moons turned out to be a bit of a rebel. Of the 12 latest moons to join Jupiter&ac ...read more
News out of Hawaii today is that we have had one first major injury event related to Kīlauea's ongoing lower East Rift Zone eruption. A tour boat sailing near the ocean entry from the Fissure 8 lava flows was struck by volcanic debris thrown by an explosion, injuring at least 23 people and tearing a hole through the roof of the boat (see below). The boat was apparently outside the 300 meter safety zone near the ocean entry (although some news reports say the b ...read more
We've become accustomed to striking imagery of wildfires captured by earth-monitoring satellites, including weather satellites stationed about 26,000 miles from the surface.
That may seem amazing enough (it always does to me). But check out the image above of a plume of wildfire smoke so big and thick that it was visible to a satellite nearly a million miles away.
Make sure to click on the image so see a larger version, and then click again to enlarge it. You'll see a f ...read more
