Mid-September in Maine is a time when there is some relief from hot days, but there is no real sign of the leaves changing color just yet. On a beautiful Saturday morning in Brunswick (a small mid-coast town known for Bowdoin College), the Curtis Memorial Library held its annual How-To Festival, which brings together local businesses, organizations, and individuals. Attendees share their skills and knowledge of doing all things under the sun, ranging from every day activities to v ...read more
Last year, astronomers announced they’d detected a comet from another solar system: ‘Oumuamua. (Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI)
On October 19, 2017, astronomers first saw an object from another solar system traveling through our own. Zipping into our solar system from above, the interloper, now known as 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua), swung around the Sun and shot away again, never to return once it leaves our neck of the woods for interstellar space once more.
What have we learned about thi ...read more
Skulls and other human remains from P.W. Lund’s Collection from Lagoa Santa, Brazil. Kept in the Natural History Museum of Denmark. (Credit: Natural History Museum of Denmark)
A new report finds people spread through the Americas in multiple independent, relatively quick migrations. The discovery contrasts the notion that the peopling of the continents took the form of a slow expansion from the northern regions of modern day Alaska into South America as populations grew.
&ldquo ...read more
Photo of the cranium of Burial 32 at the archaeological site of Lapa do Santo. DNA for the study was extracted from this individual. (Credit: Maurício de Paiva)
When the Americas were first settled, sometime in the past 25,000 years, it happened from the top down. Eurasians made their way across the Beringian land bridge (or followed the coastline, what’s known as the Kelp Highway hypothesis) from Siberia to Alaska and spread throughout their new territory.
Once they were her ...read more
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It turns out that the sun’s magnetic field can shape and push the dust of a comet’s tail, according to a revelation made possible by one young scientist’s innovative new image-processing technique.
Comet Dust
In 2007, scientists were elated when NASA’s STEREO spacecraft laid its “eyes” on Comet C/2006 P1, also known as Comet McNaught — named after astronomer Robert McNaught, who discovered the comet a year prior. Comet McNaught, which ...read more
The newfound star is not only one of the oldest stars in the universe, but also one of the most metal-poor stars known. An artist’s concept of a small red dwarf star is shown above. (Credit:NASA/Walt Feimer)
One of the oldest stars in the universe is quietly hiding out in the Milky Way some 2,000 light-years from Earth.
According to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, the tiny, 13.5-billion-year-old red dwarf contains barely any heavy elements at all, suggesting it formed ...read more
The worlds oldest figurative artwork from Borneo dated to a minimum of 40,000 years. (Credit: Luc-Henri Fage)
The oldest known figurative cave art painting in the world may be a 40,000-year-old rendering of a species of wild cattle found in a Borneo cave by a group of Griffith University researchers.
It is considerably older than a 35,400-year-old pig-deer painting discovered by the same team a few years ago in a cave located on Sulawesi, another island in Indonesia.
These recen ...read more
Air bubbles trapped in a thin ice core slice. (Credit: Tas van Ommen/Australian Antarctic Division)
“Don’t forget to write!”
Friends and loved ones bid adieu to members of the latest research team to begin the long trek to Antarctica this weekend.
The goal of this latest expedition, which is scheduled to return mid-February, is to see whether concentrations of an atmospheric molecule called hydroxyl, or OH, has changed over time since the industrial revolution. The answe ...read more
