The dense cores of past planets might survive a star’s expansion period into its white dwarf phase. (Credit: CfA/Mark A. Garlick)
In five or six billion years, our sun will expand into a red giant star hundreds of times larger than it is now. It will envelop Mercury and Venus, and possibly Earth as well, and then slowly puff away its outer layers. The hot, dense core left behind is called a white dwarf. And it will glow for billions of years.
It’s an open question what happens ...read more
Image by Alex Thornton
Despite a spirograph-like appearance, these loops and twists actually represent the flight paths and wingbeats of a flock of jackdaws, members of the wily crow family that mate for life. Researchers had thought that each member of a flock flew independently of their mates, allowing them to pay close attention to others and rapidly communicate to evade predators.
But new research in Cornwall, England, found that jackdaws stick with their mates as they fly, a sweet ...read more
A reconstruction of the newly-discovered giant parrot Heracles, dwarfing a
group of small New Zealand wrens on the forest floor. (Credit: Illustration by Dr Brian Choo, Flinders University)
If you tried to feed a cracker to this
polly you might lose a hand in the process. Paleontologists say they’ve
discovered the ancient fossil remains of the world’s only known giant parrot.
The bird stood roughly 3 feet high. And scientists
speculate it could’ve weighed as much as 15 ...read more
(Credit: Nick Fewings/Unsplash)
You swallow your last bite of lunch and head back to your desk. A stack of papers awaits you, and you’re just easing into work mode when suddenly you’re ambushed by a sudden, inexplicable hankering for potato chips. Every trace of productivity vanishes from your mind, replaced by an inexplicable fixation on that crisp, salty snack. But you just ate ... you can’t be hungry already, right?
For decades, the popular narrative of “the wisd ...read more
(Credit: Artemida-psy/Shutterstock)
In 2008, gastroenterologist Colleen Kelly had a patient with a recurring and debilitating infection of the gut with a microbe called Clostridioides difficile. Nothing Kelly did could ease the woman’s severe abdominal cramping and diarrhea.
So Kelly — at her patient’s urging — decided to try something highly experimental: transplanting a fecal sample from a healthy donor into the large intestine. And it worked.
Kelly, of Brown ...read more
It has long been believed that the manatee is a solitary animal with a very simple communication system that primarily serves one purpose: to keep mom and a calf in contact. However, in recent years, these assumptions have been questioned, based on new research indicating that manatees may not be that solitary after all and that their communication system might be more complex than we previously realized.
Manatees clearly cannot compete with other marine mammals in terms of vocal complexity ...read more
A reconstructed Homo naledi skeleton made from the bones of multiple individuals. (Credit: Lee Roger Berger research team)
In 2013 a couple of spelunkers, caving 100 feet underground in South Africa, wriggled down a narrow vertical chute. They dropped into an uncharted chamber and in the flickers of their headlamps saw human-like bones scattered across the ground. It was a new species of hominin.
The fortuitous discovery in the Rising Star Cave system led to one of the most spectacular an ...read more
New research uses wildfire smoke as a natural experiment for testing nuclear winter theory, but uncertainties remain
An animation of GOES-16 weather satellite imagery reveals thick palls of smoke billowing up from wildfires in British Columbia on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017. The smoke rose into the stratosphere and ultimately circled the globe. Eight months later, some was still visible to satellites. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA)
Raging wildfires lofting huge amounts of smoke high into the atmosphere ha ...read more
Beijing commuters drive through a layer of "severe" air pollution in this 2014 photo. A new analysis says that human-caused climate change will lead to thousands of additional deaths across Chinese cities in the decades ahead. (Credit: Hung Chung Chih/Shutterstock)
As Europe’s latest heat wave showed, climate change is scorching the Earth. The World Meteorological Organization suspects the period from 2015 to 2019 will be the warmest five years on record. China is particularly in troubl ...read more
