This artist’s rendering compares EBLM J0555-57Ab to both Jupiter and TRAPPIST-1. (Credit: A. Boetticher et al., 2017)
A team of astronomers at the University of Cambridge was on the lookout for new exoplanets when they came across an exciting accidental discovery: They found the smallest star measured to this day.
This tiny new star, which is being called EBLM J0555-57Ab, is about 600 light-years from Earth, and has a comparable mass (85 Jupiter masses) to the estimated ma ...read more
Mapping fat accumulation around arteries in the heart. (Credit: A.S. Antonopoulos et al., Science Translational Medicine (2017))
A new, noninvasive imaging method lets researchers pick up on the warning signs of heart disease long before a heart attack or stroke can take place.
The noninvasive technique uses current computed tomography (CT) scanning technology to analyze images of fatty deposits lining blood vessels in order to flag potentially dangerous inflammation. Using the data from heart ...read more
An image acquired by the Suomi-NPP satellite on July 12, 2017 reveals a gargantuan iceberg calving from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. (Image source: NASA Worldview)
It has been predicted for a long time, and now it has finally happened: One of the largest icebergs ever recorded has broken free of the Larsen C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Scientists monitoring a growing rift in the ice shelf confirmed today in a blog post that the trillion-ton iceberg had calved. ...read more
An artist’s impression of rangeomorphs. (Credit: Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill)
Before sharks and whales ruled the seas as the biggest bad boys (and girls) of the sea, there were rangeomorphs, a bizarre plant-looking-animal-type … thing. They roamed the seas of Earth around 540 million years ago, absorbing nutrients drifting in the water.
Rangeomorphs were the biggest thing in the game — and had the shape-eshifting skills to make themselves as big or as small as they needed. That c ...read more
A 70-mile-long crack runs across the Larsen C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, months before it calved into the ocean. (Credit: Jeremy Harbeck)
After months of dangling on by a miles-thin thread of ice, an iceberg roughly the size of Delaware just calved off Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf and began drifting out into the ocean.
Scientists say the complete breakthrough happened sometime between July 10 and today, July 12. It was spotted by NASA’s Aqua MODIS satellite instrument ...read more
Two Hadza hunters returning from a hunt. A new study of chronotypes, or sleep and activity patterns, among the Tanzanian hunter-gatherers sheds light on the evolutionary advantages of staggered snoozing. (Credit Wikimedia Commons/Andreas Lederer)
In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight… catchy song, even if it misrepresents Panthera leo.
Lions, like many other predators, are opportunistic about when they hunt, and that includes plenty of nocturnal prowling. New research ...read more
During the N-ICE2015 expedition, scientists froze their boat, the Lance, into the Arctic sea ice to gather data from January to June of 2015. (Source: Norwegian Polar Institute)
During each of the past three years, something quite bizarre has happened in the central Arctic.
No, global warming did not cause some Thing to rise up out of the ice and go on a rampage. It was temperatures that rose up. And not just by a little.
This occurred during extreme warming events near the Nort ...read more
