Key Takeaways on the Green Flash: The green flash is a rare, brief optical event of green, yellow, and sometimes blue that colors the horizon, occurring at sunrise or sunset most often in the western U.S.Refraction and dispersion cause the green flash, and there are four different types of green flashes that can occur.The green flash is tied to pirate folklore.From resolving matters of the heart to promises of good weather, the enigmatic green flash holds a stake in meteorological folklore.Occur ...read more

Artistic mediums certainly change. While modern humans have paint and paper, ancient humans had ochre and pebbles. However, both work well for finger painting, whether for Homo sapiens today or for Homo neanderthalensis thousands of years ago.According to a new study in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, a team of researchers may have discovered one of the oldest art objects adorned with a fingerprint from across Europe. The object, a pebble, was stamped with ochre by a Neanderthal aro ...read more

Vikings were undoubtedly masterful sailors, but even they needed a safe place to rest and evade the hazards of the seas. The pit stops on Viking voyages have mostly been lost to time due to limited archaeological evidence, but this hasn’t stopped one researcher from retracing the trade routes that Vikings embarked on. Greer Jarrett, an archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, has spent the last few years searching for answers to verify how exactly Vikings traveled on the seas. Having condu ...read more

An archeological discovery from the Dra' Abu el-Naga area on Luxor's West Bank reveals three new tombs of prominent statesmen from Egypt's New Kingdom era (1550 B.C.E. to 1070 B.C.E.). Based on the inscriptions inside the tombs, the all-Egyptian research team identified the names and owner titles of the tombs. Further research is needed to help uncover more about who these owners were, said Mohamed Ismail Khaled, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, in a statement from the ...read more

A new study in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology has made the shocking discovery that one of the most famous moments in British history never actually happened.The epic and brutal fight between a Roman legion and Britons that violently concluded the Iron Age is a key moment in British history. The battle took place at Maiden Castle Iron Age hillfort in Dorset, and the “war cemetery” that remained there is one of Britain’s most well-known archaeological discoveries. The story of brave Brit ...read more

Megalodon teeth have always been key to understanding the ancient marine predator. Fossilized teeth are all that remain to prove the existence of these massive sharks, and the name megalodon is from the Greek for “big tooth.”A new study, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, highlights the importance of the megalodon’s human-hand-sized teeth once again. Thanks to extracting and analyzing the traces of zinc left in the fossilized teeth, researchers now know that the megalodon’ ...read more

Key Takeaways on the Van Allen Belts: In 1958, James Van Allen discovered far fewer cosmic rays than expected using a cosmic-ray detector and suggested that a belt of strong radiation may have damaged the device. The belts were therefore named in honor of Van Allen.Van Allen belts are a big, energetic stew of charged particles that encircle Earth. The particles of the outer belt come from the sun by means of solar wind and are trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere. The particles ...read more

Key Takeaways on the Carrington Event: A massive solar flare, followed by a series of coronal mass ejections, caused the Carrington Event, which happened on September 1, 1859.The event disrupted global telegraph systems and caused auroras visible near the equator. If a solar event of this magnitude happened today, it would damage satellites, power grids, and communication’s networks.The solar event was named after Richard Carrington, and it remains the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recor ...read more

Cats act as if they’re bringing you a present, except the gift is a recently hunted rodent, usually of the mouse variety. Cats love to track down small animals and show off their hunting prowess, whether it’s a mouse, mole, or even a bird. So it begs the question: why does an animal that loves kibble still bring you their recently hunted victims?Cat Hunting Instincts No matter how domesticated a cat is, their hunting instinct is still very strong, says Mikel Maria Delgado, an animal behavior ...read more

Imagine a world where two-dimensional data could be moved and manipulated in a three-dimensional setting. In the hospital room, for example, a doctor may visually see, manipulate, and experience a patient’s MRI brain scan, or a building engineer may project newly designed infrastructure so investors can walk through blueprints.Rather than simply viewing two-dimensional data or information on a screen, a user can interact directly with an object, spin it around, and better visualize it in its f ...read more