To learn more from fossils they find in nature, paleontologists are trying to create their own. For decades, paleontologists have been experimenting with heat, pressure, and other factors to mimic nature’s ability to preserve the bodies of living things as fossils. Trying to copy fossilization in a laboratory would allow paleontologists to better understand the process and learn more about the history of life on our planet from the fossils they find. In a study published i ...read more

In October 1957, a basketball-sized metallic sphere began circling Earth, transmitting a beacon from above. For many, the launch of Sputnik 1 heralded in the Space Age. But lost often in the story of Sputnik, the Space Age, and the Space Race is that Sputnik wasn’t the first spaceflight, and that the first image of Earth from space didn’t come in the 1960s, but the 1940s. The actual first spaceflight is a matter of debate. The Air Force defines space as ...read more

A mind-altering parasite that can make rats suicidally attracted to cat pee may also make people more likely to start a new business, according to new findings. The scientists say that their results reveal how parasites could help shape the global economy. The parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects more than 2 billion people — that is, more than a quarter of the world population. The protozoans can live in many warm-blooded creatures, where they reproducing asexually, but they ul ...read more

Lingwulong shenqi, a newly described, 174-million-year-old dinosaur, is more than just another giant herbivore to add to the fossil record. Its age and location are unexpected, and upset notions about dino diversity and distribution during the Jurassic Period. Lingwulong's name translates as "the amazing dragon of Lingwu," the region in northwestern China where multiple specimens have been excavated over the past 13 years. I'll be honest with you ...read more

I don't know about you, but nothing wakes me up in the morning quite like an announcement from a peer-reviewed journal declaring that paleontologists have found Bigfoot in the Black Hills region of the U.S. Sooooo...yeah. Not quite. But they are claiming the dinosaur foot they found belonged to the biggest dino ever — which they nicknamed "Bigfoot." Sneaky clickbait? Sure. But also some interesting science. Read on: The game is afoot. The new study's title actually kicks of ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. Many of us may be considering “burning some fat� so we feel better in our bathing suits out on the beach or at the pool. What does that actually mean, though? The normal fat cell exists primarily to store energy. The body will expand the number of fat cells and the size of fat cells to accommodate excess energy from high-calorie foods. It will even go so far as to start depositing fat cell ...read more

You may have heard about California's Ferguson Fire, which has killed one firefighter and is threatening to spread into Yosemite National Park. But a series of other fires, sparked by lighting to the north, are also raging. And now, thousands of firefighters struggling to contain the blazes must contend with a heat wave descending on the region. In the image above, acquired today (Monday, July 23) by NASA's Terra satellite, look for a thick pall of smoke in ...read more

NASA is about to make it a little easier to check your Instagram in zero gravity. Two teams, Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations, are working together to finally make interplanetary internet a thing. Previous efforts to bring WiFi throughout the solar system haven’t always been successful, but this time, it could become reality. It will work using something called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, which is pretty similar to the internet you& ...read more

Today, the moon is about as inhospitable to life as it gets. The little water that’s there is trapped in ice or rock. It’s otherwise dry and airless, fluctuating in temperature by hundreds of degrees anywhere the sun shines. But long ago? That’s an entirely different story. New research published in Astrobiology suggests that the moon may have been shockingly habitable in the past during at least two periods — shortly a ...read more

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the largest member of the Milky Way’s gang of galactic neighbors, known as the Local Group. With around a trillion suns worth of mass, Andromeda’s gravitational influence is a force to be reckoned with. And according to new research, no galaxy in the Local Group knows this better than M32, an oddball satellite galaxy now orbiting Andromeda. In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers showed that about 2 billion ...read more