Meteorites are thought to have delivered many of the materials necessary for life, which might even include deadly cyanide. (Credit: NASA's GSFC Conceptual Image Lab)
Science is still uncertain as to how exactly life first arose. While experiments with electricity and simple ingredients can make amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and the framework for all living things as we know them, how to make the jump from lifeless chains of molecules to biological life is still unknown.
S ...read more
The Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope is the first to pinpoint the source of a non-repeating Fast Radio Burst. (Credit: CSIRO/Andrew Howells)
Fast Radio Bursts are one of space’s great mysteries. Discovered for the first time only in 2007, they are massively powerful bursts of radio waves that last for just a fraction of a second. The vast majority of these signals occur once, and then never happen again – making them especially hard to track and study. Scientists know tha ...read more
This American alligator, like crocodiles and other related species, is a meat-eating power biter. (Credit: US Fish & Wildlife Service)
Someone says "crocodiles" and the image that comes to mind is probably a toothy one. Modern crocodilians are power biters, and many species are apex predators. But it wasn't always that way.
Paleontologists believe that multiple extinct species preferred plants over prey.
Toothfully Speaking
Humans, like most mammals, are heterodonts: We have ...read more
These two Hubble images show gravitationally lensed galaxies and their halos (pink), as well as the galaxy clusters (yellow) responsible for the lensing. Gravitational lensing often results in more than one image of a single galaxy (right), or sometimes smears that light out into a ring (left). (Credit: ESO/NASA/ESA/A. Claeyssens)
Galaxies are not just the glowing stars and gas you see through a telescope. They are swaddled in a huge ball, or “halo,” of hydrogen that stretches vas ...read more
Artist's rendering of the Black Sea big bird Pachystruthio, which researchers estimate was comparable to Madagascar's elephant birds and New Zealand's moa. (Credit: Andrey Atuchin)
Towering more than ten feet tall and weighing in at about 1,000 pounds, big bird Pachystruthio was a big deal. The animal, which weighed about as much as a male polar bear, roamed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. That's thousands of miles — and across the equator — from the better-known avian giants.
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A study detected hidden consciousness in one out of seven unresponsive brain injury patients using widely-available hospital technology. (Credit: Chairoij/Shutterstock)
There are some things that life never prepares you for — like the dreaded phone call that a loved one is in a coma, and you’re responsible for making their end-of-life decisions if they don’t wake up. These decisions are further complicated by the fact that there’s no true test for consciousness. And, u ...read more
Lightning strikes are preceded by "glows" of gamma ray radiation, scientists find. (Credit: Breno Machado/Unsplash)
Summer in the U.S. brings big thunderstorms. Towering thunderhead clouds fill the skies and energy permeates the air as positive and negative electrical charges build up between the earth and the atmosphere. Lightning bolts reset the tension with a tremendous jolt of energy.
Now researchers discover glows of gamma rays – high-energy electromagnetic radiation – ap ...read more
The clump of gas ALMA spotted, about as long as the distance between the Sun and Jupiter, may one day become a fully-fledged planet. (Credit: ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, Tsukagoshi et al.)
Stars in the early stages of their lives are surrounded by flat disks of dust and gas, spinning slowly around them. Over time, this material clumps together to form planets, or eventually gets blown away by the stellar wind. This process can take millions of years, so astronomers don’t have a way to watch it ...read more
(Credit: Dusan Petkovic/Shutterstock)
If you see someone in need, would you help them out even if you might get hurt in the process?
Psychology experiments have often shown that people are unlikely to help others in need when another person is close by. This dismal human reaction is called the “bystander effect,” named for the people who stand by and do nothing. But most of the research on the bystander effect comes from carefully controlled lab settings, not from the real worl ...read more
The growing ash plume from Ulawun in PNG, captured just after the eruption started in June 26, 2019. Image: Himawari-8, JMA.
For the second time in a week, a blast from a new eruption has topped the 10 kilometers. However, unlike Raikoke in Russia, this one came from a volcano that has a well-known history of big explosions.
Ulawun, on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, unleashed an eruption this morning (local time) that reached at least 13.5 kilometers (45,000 feet) accordin ...read more
