Millions of years before the most famous meat-eating dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, roamed the planet, other massive creatures claimed the role of apex predators in the Triassic period — which stretched from 252 million years to 201 million years ago. One of those was Fasolasuchus tenax, a nearly ten-meter (about 32 feet) relative of the early ancestor of modern-day crocodiles. Lesser known than many of those massive meat-eating dinosaurs that dominated later ...read more

In 2010, Chelsea Wood was conducting a biological survey of the Line Islands, a chain of atolls and coral outcrops a thousand miles south of Hawaii. Some islands are heavily populated, home to a robust fishing trade, while others have never been permanently inhabited by humans. Seizing upon the opportunity afforded by such a stark contrast, Wood, then a budding parasitologist pursuing her Ph.D. in biology at Stanford University, decided to compare the worms living in the organs of fish from the ...read more

Love is confusing. People in the U.S. Google the word “love” about 1.2 million times a month. Roughly a quarter of those searches ask “what is love” or request a “definition of love.”What is all this confusion about?Neuroscience tells us that love is caused by certain chemicals in the brain. For example, when you meet someone special, the hormones dopamine and norepinephrine can trigger a reward response that makes you want to see this person again. Like tasting chocolate, you want m ...read more

To experience a volcanic eruption is to witness nature’s raw power. If you would like to see one for yourself, Iceland is a great location for it. Since 2021, seven eruptions have taken place along the Reykjanes Peninsula, close to Reykjavík.These recent Icelandic eruptions have garnered attention from Earth scientists like me. The eruptions help us understand how volcanoes work in incredible detail. My team has been taking samples from the erupting lava from the Reykjanes Peninsula and findi ...read more

In recent years, black holes have morphed from highly theoretical exotic possibilities to well-observed astrophysical objects. The observational evidence has come from sources such as the first observation of ripples in spacetime caused by black hole collisions and the first image of a black hole published in 2019.Black holes are predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes the universe on the largest scale. But these objects must also distort spacetime on the tiniest ...read more

Sometimes daydreams turn into reality. As an undergrad, Martin Smith remembers attending a lecture that stuck with him. The talk touched on the difficulty of showing how ancient wormlike creatures evolved into more complex organisms with arms and legs — like insects, spiders, crabs, and centipedes. Demonstrating that had so far proved daunting, since no Cambrian period larval fossil contained the details necessary to make any evolutionary inferences. Smith remembers thinking, "If they ever fin ...read more

Beyond Earth's blue skies stretches a universe full of possibilities, including countless stars with planets that might support life. While Earth is the only known host of life, astronomers have identified several exoplanets that could potentially support it. "An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun,” explains Michelle Hill, an Earth and planetary science researcher at the University of California, Riverside.One crucial factor in determining a planet's potential for life ...read more

The Hubble telescope, which has served as an incredibly advanced window into the universe for over thirty years, has recently struggled with several less-than-stellar service disruptions.But, NASA officials insist, the telescope’s legacy is far from finished — and it’s projected to remain active well into the next decade.Over the past six months, Hubble has repeatedly experienced technological malfunctions, causing the telescope to enter “safe mode” and temporarily pause viewing as sci ...read more

Dimetrodon was the largest predator of its time, preying on giant amphibians nearly 300 million years ago during the Early Permian period.“They were eating basically whatever they wanted,” says Kirstin Brink, a paleontologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada who studies these creatures.But these ancient sail-finned creatures have often been misunderstood throughout history and were incorrectly classified as dinosaurs for some of the past 150 years. The Dimetrodon were instead more clo ...read more

Quantum computing offers the hope of dramatic increases in computational capabilities. That’s the promise of quantum computers that can handle hundreds of thousands or millions of quantum bits or qubits. But for the moment, the state-of-the-art machines barely manage a few dozen qubits and cannot yet outperform classical computers in any meaningful way. Part of the problem is that quantum algorithms generally require hundreds or thousands of qubits, even for simple problems. So mathematicians ...read more