A simulation of an accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole.
(Credit: Scott C. Noble)
When the LIGO collaboration first detected the spacetime ripples of a gravitational wave it came from the merger of two black holes. To date, scientists have detected at least ten pairs of black holes spiraling into and combining with each other.
But there's still an outstanding mystery about these singularities: why are some of them so big? Some have been far larger than scientists think po ...read more
An illustration depicting a Type I X-ray burst. A similar supernova generated the extreme X-ray burst that NASA's NICER instrument recently recorded. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA))
In late August, an instrument on the International Space Station, called NICER, spotted its brightest burst of X-ray radiation yet.
NICER, or the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, studies X-rays that come from neutron stars, the super-dense remnants of some stars afte ...read more
An artist's reconstruction of what Fukuipteryx prima may have looked like. (Credit: Masanori Yoshida)
It was a typical Japanese summer — hot, humid and cloudy — when archaeologists pulled a well-preserved, fossilized bird from the ground in 2013. Their find, announced this week in Nature Communications Biology, might change our idea of what adaptations were essential to the development of flight.
Close to Flight
Named Fukuipteryx prima, the archaeologists date the bird ...read more
The bird's fossil was found with its 3D structure intact — a rare find that helped paleontologists glean insights into the development of flight. ...read more
(Credit: Gladskikh Tatiana/Shutterstock)
Some of
the biggest public health crises of the last few years can be traced back to
animals. HIV got its start as a virus in monkeys, and Ebola probably jumped to humans from other primates or fruit
bats. And there’s no points for guessing the animals we got bird flu and swine
flu from. But animal-borne diseases can start a lot closer to home. In fact,
there are a number we can pick up from our dogs and cats.
Our Pets, Their Diseases
M ...read more
A floating butterfly created by the Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display. (Credit: Eimontas Jankauskis)
With the help of sound waves and a small plastic ball, researchers in the U.K. have designed a machine that generates truly 3D holographs.
The whole system is slightly smaller than a shoebox and makes simple images, like a butterfly or smiley face, that are less than an inch tall. Described in Nature, the device is one of the first 3D image generators that also responds to touch and produce ...read more
Scene from the Books of the Dead (The Egyptian museum) showing the ibis-headed God Thoth recording the result of the final judgement. (Credit: Wasef et al, 2019)
Ancient Egyptian catacombs stretch for kilometers underground. Branching off the tunnels are rooms, and those rooms are stacked to the ceilings with jars holding more than one million mummified African sacred ibises.
Egyptians buried millions of these leggy, long-beaked birds as prayer offerings to Thoth, the god of wisdom a ...read more
Artist's rendering of how large Gigantopithecus blacki may have been. In life, G. blacki would have spent most of its time on all fours. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
There's nothing small about Gigantopithecus blacki. The massive extinct animal likely rivaled a modern polar bear in size, weighing more than 1,000 pounds and standing nearly ten feet tall on its back legs.
The mystery around G. blacki is also super-sized. This largest of primates is known only from plentiful teeth and a fe ...read more
