Before deciding to dig up human remains, archaeologists must first ask themselves a complicated set of questions. (Credit: Masarik/shutterstock)
Banana was code for human bones, on one archaeological dig where I’ve worked. We were excavating a cemetery, several thousand years old, and had permits from the appropriate authorities. However, certain religious groups in the area had a history of protesting any destruction of burials, so we kept our work discrete.
We packed excavated skeleton ...read more
This artistically enhanced image shows a Hubble Space Telescope view of the active galaxy Arp 220, which houses a feeding supermassive black hole at its center. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Black holes are by nature difficult to study directly. Because even light cannot escape these massive objects, astronomers must turn to other methods to spot and study them. While information is lost once it crosses a black hole’s event horizon, outside that boundary, it can still escape. A recent study ...read more
This image shows V838 Mon, which exploded as a “red nova” in January 2002, suddenly becoming 600,000 times brighter than our Sun. A similar explosion was expected to occur in 2022, but the unprecedented prediction recently fell through. (Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
It’s time to face a hard truth. Good science is mostly about meticulously testing informed predictions. And, sadly, these predictions often fall flat.
This is exactly what just happened ...read more
A man runs sled dogs in the snow. (Credit: Danny Iacob/shutterstock)
This story originally appeared in SAPIENS, an online magazine focused on anthropology.
In the Siberian Arctic, the Ob River flows lazily across vast, cold stretches of tundra. In the city of Salekhard, Russia, where it meets with the Polui River, lie the remains of an ancient ritual site. Overlooking the floodplains, it is known as Ust’-Polui. It is thought to date back to 260 B.C. and to have been occupied until A.D. 1 ...read more
Brazil’s National museum burned, destroying priceless historical and scientific artifacts. (Credit: A.PAES/shutterstock)
A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation.
We now know what history going up in flames looks like.
On Sept. 2, the National Museum of Brazil lit up Rio de Janeiro’s night sky. Perhaps started by an errant paper hot air balloon landing on the roof or a short circuit in a laboratory, the fire gutted the historic 200-year-old building. Likely ...read more
ATERUI II in the flesh at NAOJ’s Center for Computational Astrophysics. The design on the housing of ATERUI II represents an artist’s (Jun Kosaka) contemporary take on traditional Japanese block style lettering, spelling out the supercomputer’s nickname.(Credit: NAOJ)
One of the long-standing problems in astronomy is that you cannot hold the Sun. You can’t jump into it or examine it under a microscope. Nor can astronomers go back in time to witness the Big Bang or even ...read more
Stegodyphus dumicola spiders. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
A bold or aggressive person can change the dynamic of a group. That happens in spider colonies, too.
In a study published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers show that bold spiders can change the behavior of other spiders. The meek spiders start copying the behavior, something that can both help and potentially harm the colony.
Copycat Spiders
Researchers collected colonies of Stegodyphus dumicola in South Afric ...read more
Robat can’t fly. But the autonomous robot can use echolocation to survey its environment. (Robat is a fully-autonomous bat-like terrestrial robot that uses echolocation to navigate its environment. (Credit: Itamar Eliakim)
Bats can fly nimbly at night in large part because echolocation helps them “see” in the dark. Now researchers say they have created the first robot to use echolocation like a bat to help it explore its surroundings fully autonomously.
Bats echolocate by emi ...read more
Researchers witness a one billion year old galaxy blow molecular gas to its outskirts to avoid an overproduction of stars. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Spilker; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello; AURA/NSF
The years following the Big Bang were undoubtedly an exciting time in our cosmological history, with galaxies birthing hundreds or even thousands of hot new stars each year. But despite rapid star formation being exhilarating, it’s far from sustainable.
Star Formation Secrets
Re ...read more
