In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of Spanish astronomers announced the discovery of one of the first stars to form in the Milky Way. The unevolved star, called J0815+4729, is located 7,500 light-years away in the halo of the Milky Way and likely formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, some 13.5 billion years ago. “We know of only a few stars (which can be counted on the fingers of a hand) of this type in the halo [of the Milky W ...read more

Cheetahs evolved to become the fastest animals on land. Now scientists find that not only do swift limbs help cheetahs hunt down prey, but so too do tiny bony tubes within their skulls that help the cats keep their gazes locked on their targets. Cheetahs have been clocked sprinting at up to 61 miles per hour, speeds that help them chase fleet prey such as gazelles. Intriguingly, while cheetahs run, their heads barely move, helping them hold an incredibly still gaze on their prey while in ...read more

There's a new kid in town — in Creepycrawly Town, to be exact. But there's much more to this leggy fella than nightmarishly good looks. A pair of papers out today detail how this 100-million-year-old discovery, preserved in amber, fits into the spider evolution story...and the ways it doesn't. Known from four specimens, the ancient arachnid's formal name is Chimerarachne yingi. Its genus name, from the mythic Greek Chimera, is a nod to its unusual mix of features. The ...read more

Like most animals that thrive in cities, rats get a bad rap. We even use the word "rat" for nasty people, particularly those that go behind your back. But this study suggests that rat society may not be so bad after all. By placing rats in special cages that allow them to give food only to another rat (not themselves), these researchers found that rats will trade grooming for help with getting food. In fact, the more help they got, the more grooming they gave. Maybe it's time to update the ...read more

Thanks especially to warm temperatures, plus a lack of precipitation, the snowpack in most of the Western United States is in bad shape right now — nowhere worse than in California's Sierra Nevada range. For all but the northern reaches of the region, snowpack stands at no more than about 50 percent of average, and in many places it's much worse. For California, snowpack as of today, Feb. 4, is at just 25 percent of normal. Luckily, the state's reservoirs are still brimming with wa ...read more

Check out this image captured Thursday by NASA's Aqua satellite. See that swirling vortex, complete with a clear eye? It has formed just off the coast of San Clemente Island to the west of San Diego. Here's what it looked like to an F-18 fighter pilot flying directly over the feature: https://twitter.com/WXMegs/status/959638888993173506 This is a classic von Kármán vortex, a cyclonic swirl of clouds that can develop when winds are diverted around a big obstacle such an ...read more

As with our planet as a whole, if you want to know the fate of polar bears in a warming world, you need to follow the energy. For the planet, researchers have been doing just that by keeping track of how carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere have been tipping the climate's energy balance toward more and more warming. And the high north where polar bears live has warmed faster than any other region on Earth, resulting in shrinking sea ice and a cascade o ...read more

It can be hard to say "thank you." Shyness, stubbornness and the fear of opening ourselves up to another can strangle those two words to silence in our mouths. Gratitude is especially hard to convey when you're trying to thank a famous broadcaster for starting you on your scientific journey. At the core of most of these species we've featured, these "Attenboroughs," is a humble message of thanks, given in the best way a researcher knows how. Attenborough's hawkweed, Hieracium attenbo ...read more

Airbus first announced its plans to create a self-flying taxi service in 2016. On Jan. 31, after two years of planning and building, it proved it isn’t just a pipedream — the Vahana successfully completed its first flight test. The full-scale aircraft flew fully autonomously for 53 seconds at an altitude of 16 feet (gotta start somewhere) at its testing grounds in Pendleton, Oregon. It conducted another flight the following day, which seems to have gone well, too. The FAA was in att ...read more

Woodpecker brains preserved in ethanol feel a bit like modeling clay. That’s according to George Farah, a graduate student at Boston University School of Medicine who scooped the brains out of downy woodpecker specimens stored at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. “Some were like angel food cake, it’s together but can easily be broken; it can easily fracture,” says Farah. “I have a lot of experience with preserved brains.” Farah, along with his ...read more