If there’s a highway to hell, there’s probably a gate to hell—well, there is. It's located in what was the ancient Greco-Roman city of Hierapolis, which is now in modern-day Turkey. Called Plutonium after Pluto, the gate was thought to be an opening to the underworld. It was first described by the ancient Greek geographer Strabo and Roman author Plinius. When Strabo visited, he described a thick vapor that would overtake the gate. During religious ceremonies, the cas ...read more

I mean, really. No matter how you feel about the man, surely his mother is off-limits? Translated from the Latin, the full name of this species comes out to be "Attenborough's mother fish." Attenborough's mother — a fish! Where I come from, them's fightin' words. But the name is quite accurate. Hot takes aside, the fossil of Materpiscis attenboroughi actually turns out to contain the oldest vertebrate pregnancy we've ever found. It sets in stone the ancient roots of live bi ...read more

For well over 1,500 years, humanity accepted that Earth was the center of the solar system. After all, the Bible—which was the scientific authority at the time—said this was so. Then along came Nicolaus Copernicus, who in the 16th century dared to challenge the church and mathematically described a solar system with the sun at its center. After his death, Galileo Galilei’s observations of heavenly bodies further supported the Copernican model. The Catholic Church, fearing such ...read more

On February 6, SpaceX wrote a new chapter in the ongoing book on commercial spaceflight with the successful launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket. Along for the ride was Musk’s red Tesla Roadster, which is now on an elliptical orbit around the Sun. But what about the risk to Earth? Could the car, which is estimated to last up to a few tens of millions of years, ever pose the threat of raining down from the sky as a fireball in the future? The answer, as it turns out, is probably not. A&n ...read more

In 1981, when I was nine years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although I had to squint my eyes during some of the scary scenes, I loved it – in particular because I was fairly sure that Harrison Ford’s character was based on my dad. My father was a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, and I’d gone on several field trips with him to the Rocky Mountains, where he seemed to transform into a rock-hammer-wielding superhero. That illusion was shattere ...read more

Although many people believe that dogs can read their owners' emotions, it was only recently shown that dogs can visually differentiate between happiness and anger. In fact, they are the first animals shown to discriminate emotions in another species. This study extends this line of research, adding an auditory component—they test whether dogs can match visual and sound representation of emotions. The researchers showed the pooches a face and either a concordant (matchi ...read more

Darting spaceships. Dazzling lasers. Fiery explosions. All of these are things that a war in space would almost certainly not involve. Ever since Star Wars, the public has been fascinated by the visuals of space conflict — it's futuristic, thrilling, and cosmic battles are bereft of the gore that so often accompanies terrestrial conflict. And ever since Sputnik, humans have been putting things into space, pieces of technology that are now vital cogs in the machinery of society. We rely on ...read more

New research suggests that large parts of the world are headed for record-breaking extreme weather events. At the same time, the U.S. intelligence community has broken with President Trump on the threats posed by climate change and other environmental challenges. Meanwhile, the president is proposing to slash climate science and renewable energy research while boosting investments in oil, gas and coal — the fuels driving global warming. According to the new research,  ...read more

Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy (M31) are giant spiral galaxies in our local universe. And in about 4 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide in a gravitational sumo match that will ultimately bind them forever. Because astronomers previously thought that Andromeda was up to three times as massive as the Milky Way, they expected that our galaxy would be easily overpowered and absorbed into our larger neighbor. But now, new research suggests we’ve over ...read more

The conspiracy-minded will shout "chemtrails." Of course that's nonsense. But just what is creating these clouds? I have to admit that I was a little taken aback when I saw these long, sinuous cloud shapes snaking across the northeast Pacific Ocean. The image, captured by NASA's Terra satellite on Feb. 12, 2018, covers a huge amount of territory — as is evident if you look to the extreme right, where a good portion of the west coast of North America is visible. Before I ...read more