The watery exoplanet K2-18 b is surrounded by water vapor in this artist's illustration. (Credit: Alex Boersma) Astronomers have finally uncovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. The find means that liquid water could also exist on the rocky world's surface, potentially even forming a global ocean. The discovery, made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, serves as the first detection of water vapor in the atmosphere ...read more

It can be tricky to make it look like people are doing things they never did. (Credit: Alexander Sobol/Shutterstock) Lots of people – including Congress – are worried about fake videos and imagery distorting the truth, purporting to show people saying and doing things they never said or did. I’m part of a larger U.S. government project that is working on developing ways to detect images and videos that have been manipulated. My team’s work, though, is to play the ro ...read more

A new pterosaur dubbed the "Cold Dragon of the North" is one of the largest ever. (Credit: David Maas) (Inside Science) -- A new species of giant pterosaur has been discovered in the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada, whose snowy, windy winters gave Cryodrakon its name. Based on the largest vertebra yet found of this species, adults may have possessed wingspans of roughly 10 meters (33 feet). "That's an animal probably comparable to a giraffe in height -- more than 4 meters [13 f ...read more

Orange roughy live in the deep ocean, where they're often caught by trawling ships. (Credit: New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) Would you eat an animal if you knew it was as old as the U.S. Constitution? Scientists in New Zealand have aged a fish called an orange roughy at between 230- and 245-years-old, making it one of the longest-lived fin-fish on record. The ancient fish was born in the late 1700s — and then caught in 2015 by a New Zealand com ...read more

This artist’s concept of a lake at the North Pole of Titan shows the raised features that inspired the theory that exploding pockets of liquid nitrogen may be forming craters, which become lake basins. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Saturn’s moon Titan is a distant and frigid world, but it also carries intriguing similarities to Earth’s own terrain. Liquid lakes and seas dot its landscape, though the methane and ethane that fill them are a far cry from terrestrial water. Now a n ...read more

A skull from Sima de los Huesos showing evidence of blunt force trauma. (Credit: Sala et al./PLOS One) From the scene, authorities recovered DNA, a stone handaxe and more than 7,000 scattered bones, including a bashed human skull. It was a case for the ages. But there was one complication: the events unfolded 430,000 years ago. The evidence was unearthed by anthropologists beginning in the 1980s at Sima de los Huesos — the “pit of bones” — in Spain’s Atapuer ...read more

This is one of the Neanderthal footprints discovered at Le Rozel. (Credit: Image courtesy of Dominique Cliquet) At first glimpse, it looks like the Neanderthals might have just vanished around the corner. Their footprints are engraved in the soft oceanside rock, like photographic negatives of their passage, seemingly ready to be swept away by the nearby ocean. In reality, the impressions are around 80,000 years old, pressed into ancient sediments by a group of ancient humans and preserved ...read more

(Credit: Grisha Bruev/Shutterstock) Car batteries don’t last forever. Generally, they need to be replaced every five to six years, sometimes sooner, depending how worn they are. But engineers working to develop batteries for Tesla claim to have created one that can outlast a typical vehicle’s power source by over a decade. Researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada tested a new lithium-ion cell battery that could last for roughly 20 years, or one million miles, according to ...read more

Electrophorus voltai, one of the two newly discovered electric eel species, lives in the Brazilian highlands. (Credit: L. Sousa) In the murky freshwater rivers and streams that snake across the Amazon lurks an eight-foot fascination: the electric eel. Since their discovery more than 250 years ago by Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, researchers have thought the electric eel was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, with only one species, Electrophorus electricus. Now scientists say they have di ...read more

(Credit: shepele4ek2304/Shutterstock) Yes, physical activity is good for your health, but sometimes – OK, maybe a lot – you just don’t want to. How do you get yourself up and going when inspiration lags? According to a new study, the answer may be a little friendly competition. In a study out Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers have found that gamifying physical activity objectives encourages people to take more steps per day than merely s ...read more