Astronomers first found Comet C/2019 Q4 on August 30. The past week of observations, including this image taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii's Big Island, have increased astronomers confidence that the comet started life in another solar system. (Credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope) A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited. Formally named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), the object appears to have come from outside our solar system. If confirmed, that would make it the seco ...read more

A gigantic area of super-warm water has formed again off the U.S. West Coast, threatening impacts on weather and wildlife A map of sea surface temperature anomalies shows a blob of very warm water off the West Coast of the North America. (Source: Climate Reanalyzer, University of Maine) Five years ago, a gigantic cauldron of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean wreaked havoc on marine ecosystems and contributed to drought along the western coast of North America. Dubbed "The Blob ...read more

Hurricane Dorian seen from the MODIS imager on Terra, August 31, 2019. NASA. We seem to now live in an age where people are comfortable ignoring experts, especially those in the sciences. You may have noticed that Hurricane Dorian didn't hit Alabama. Depending on the circles in which you run, you might think it was a "close call" or a completely mistaken statement that Alabama was ever in any real danger from the hurricane. However, what is clear is that when experts in meteorology -- the ...read more

(Credit: Shidlovski/Shutterstock) Cancer therapies often fail to work when tested in clinical trials. As a result, a startling 97 percent of drugs designed for specific cancer treatments do not receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Now researchers say they may have figured out part of the reason why.  In a new study out Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists report many cancer drugs don't work the way their designers assumed the ...read more

Dead seaweed chokes beaches across the Caribbean every year. (Credit: Playa del Carmen/Shutterstock) (Inside Science) -- In the summer of 2018, thousands of tons of a prolific seaweed called sargassum invaded the pristine beaches of the Caribbean. In Mexico, the turquoise waters and clear, smooth sand of the touristy Mayan Riviera turned into a brown mess. The sight of sargassum -- a type of brown algae -- and its smell scared tourists away, and local ecosystems started to suffer greatly. ...read more

The MeerKAT telescope is superimposed on a radio image of the Milky Way's center. Radio bubbles extend from between the two nearest antennas to the upper right corner, with filaments running parallel to the bubbles. (Credit: SARAO/MeerKAT) The Milky Way is blowing bubbles. Two giant radio bubbles, extending out from the galaxy for over 1,400 light years, were just discovered in X-ray data. Astronomers think the bubbles started forming a few million years ago due to some type of cataclysmic ...read more

The watery exoplanet K2-18 b is surrounded by water vapor in this artist's illustration. (Credit: Alex Boersma) Astronomers have finally uncovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. The find means that liquid water could also exist on the rocky world's surface, potentially even forming a global ocean. The discovery, made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, serves as the first detection of water vapor in the atmosphere ...read more

It can be tricky to make it look like people are doing things they never did. (Credit: Alexander Sobol/Shutterstock) Lots of people – including Congress – are worried about fake videos and imagery distorting the truth, purporting to show people saying and doing things they never said or did. I’m part of a larger U.S. government project that is working on developing ways to detect images and videos that have been manipulated. My team’s work, though, is to play the ro ...read more

A new pterosaur dubbed the "Cold Dragon of the North" is one of the largest ever. (Credit: David Maas) (Inside Science) -- A new species of giant pterosaur has been discovered in the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada, whose snowy, windy winters gave Cryodrakon its name. Based on the largest vertebra yet found of this species, adults may have possessed wingspans of roughly 10 meters (33 feet). "That's an animal probably comparable to a giraffe in height -- more than 4 meters [13 f ...read more

Orange roughy live in the deep ocean, where they're often caught by trawling ships. (Credit: New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) Would you eat an animal if you knew it was as old as the U.S. Constitution? Scientists in New Zealand have aged a fish called an orange roughy at between 230- and 245-years-old, making it one of the longest-lived fin-fish on record. The ancient fish was born in the late 1700s — and then caught in 2015 by a New Zealand com ...read more