Astronomers Find A ‘Fossil Cloud’ Uncontaminated Since the Big Bang

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A Big Bang Fossil Astronomers have discovered an ancient remnant of the Big Bang with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. This scrap of pure material from the universe's beginning could help researchers to better understand how and why different types of stars and galaxies formed in the early universe. A group of astronomers, led by Fred Robert and Michael Murphy of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia used telescopes at the W. M. Keck Obe ...read more

Ancient DNA Analysis Could Return Aboriginal Remains to Native Peoples

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Scores of Aboriginal Australians were taken from their homelands when Europeans colonized Australia. And today, native peoples and their ancestors’ remains are scattered throughout the country and at museums around the world. Now, new research shows DNA analysis can identify where to repatriate the ancestral remains. “Our findings show that DNA can be used to help determine the origin of ancient Aboriginal Australian remains that have [otherwise] been impossible to provenance,& ...read more

How Do Stars Get So Massive? Their Dense, Unstable Disks Could Be To Blame

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Any bodybuilder will tell you that you can’t bulk up overnight, but that might not be true for stars. While observing infant star Gaia 17bpi, astronomers saw part of its dense disk collapse onto its body below — adding mass at an incredible rate. This encounter is one of the few times that researchers have seen a star's disk become gravitationally unstable and fall down to its host. The findings, which will appear in the Astrophysical Journal, could shed light on stell ...read more

Astronauts Set To Return to Earth in Spacecraft They Just Cut a Hole In

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Tonight at 8:40 p.m. EST, Expedition 57 Commander Alexander Gerst and Flight Engineers Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Sergey Prokopyev will end their 197-day mission in space and return home inside the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft. The astronauts will undock the spacecraft from the International Space Station, travel back toward Earth, and ultimately parachute down to Kazakhstan three-and-a-half hours later. Prokopyev will command the Soyuz flight which will be live-streamed ...read more

A New Robot Hand Can Play the Piano Without Moving its Fingers

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Halloween may be behind us, but The Nightmare Before Christmas proved you can combine the spooky holiday with the “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” to get some fabulous music. With that in mind, we present a robot hand, shaped like a human skeleton’s, that can play jingle bells: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYe3xEP0zxM Credit: Josie Hughes To paraphrase a Russian proverb, the marvel is not that the robot skeleton hand plays well, but that the robot skeleton hand plays at ...read more

How Humans Invented Writing — Four Different Times

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About 5,000 years ago, 30 goats changed hands between Sumerians. To record the transaction, a receipt was carved onto a clay tag, about the size of a Post-it. Simple geometric signs represented the livestock and purveyor. The indents of circles and semicircles denoted the quantity exchanged. Imagine how surprised these people would be to learn their receipt is now held in a museum. That’s because the tag is one of the earliest texts from the oldest known writing system, Mesopotamian cu ...read more

Meet Saltriovenator: Oldest Known Big Predatory Dinosaur

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Paleontologists working in northern Italy have announced the oldest large-size predatory dinosaur known to the fossil record. Saltriovenator zanellai weighed about a ton and, at nearly 200 million years old, predates more famous megapredators by at least 25 million years. Saltriovenator's bones are also the first dinosaur remains to preserve evidence of marine animals that gnawed on its carcass. The biggest thing about S. zanellai, however, may be its hands: The animal's fingers could ...read more

Even Antarctica Has Invasive Species

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Antarctica, a continent isolated by vast oceans and brutal weather, has weathered the impacts of human activities better than most places. It's clearly not immune, of course — it's melting — but the South Pole has been spared most other human-caused degradations. Unfortunately, we can add another to the list. An invasive insect species is spreading across Signy Island in Antarctica, endangering the local ecosystem. It's a species of flightless midge, Eretmoptera murph ...read more

This 200-Acre, ‘Humungous Fungus’ May Help Unravel Why Cancer Genes Are Unstable

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In the mid-'80s, scientists discovered a giant fungus growing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Now, researchers have found the organism is at least 2,500 years old. And the secret to the mushroom’s longevity might be a genome that’s highly resistant to mutation, the team reports today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The discovery could help researchers figure out why cancer genomes are so unstable. Forest Recycler In 1983, Johann Bruhn planted red pines in the ...read more

When Black Hole Jets Create Natural Particle Accelerators

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Cosmic rays are energetic particles moving at high speeds. Because it takes significant energy to create them, they often serve as cosmic messengers, revealing clues about the extreme environments that produce them — such as supermassive black holes. On Earth, scientists use accelerators to generate and study particles moving at high speeds, but nature needs no such apparatus. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have found a possible mechanis ...read more

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