For the past few decades, if you asked an astronomer how the moon was created, nearly all of them would tell you that a Mars-sized world nicknamed Theia crashed into the early Earth, sending a cloud of debris high into space where it coalesced into our silvery satellite. And there's strong evidence to support this idea.
But dig deeper, and you'll find nagging problems with the theory. Almost all models of the giant impact imply that the moon should still contain a lot of The ...read more
It may look more like the impression of a jellybean in Play-Doh, or excavations for a kidney-shaped swimming pool, but researchers say the find, at about 15,600 years old, is the oldest human footprint in the Americas — and the latest evidence that people were living throughout the New World much earlier than thought.
According to paleontologists, the single footprint — technically called an ichnofossil, or ichnite — belonged to a human. The impression, preserved in ...read more
(Inside Science) -- A newfound fossil that scientists described as perplexing, beautiful and the platypus of the crab family is now shedding light on how its crustacean relatives evolved, a new study finds.
Paleontologists examined more than 70 exceptionally well-preserved specimens of the entirely new branch of the crab evolutionary tree, along with hundreds of fossils of shrimp and other kinds of crustaceans, from deposits in Colombia and the United States that are 90 million to 95 mill ...read more
Dark matter has long frustrated researchers. It seems to make up most of our universe, yet it barely interacts with that universe. And despite a plethora of active experiments hunting for dark matter, so far they’ve all turned up empty.
That has some researchers turning to the next best thing: other dark particles. Our world of normal matter has lots of different particles, so perhaps there’s a whole dark world of particles as well. To be clear, no one’s found t ...read more
The amazing thing about national archives is that these libraries contain absolutely everything. Case in point: I recently found a letter in the Nixon Library from the Apollo Dry & Wet Cleaners in Pakistan. The owner was, apparently, a little miffed NASA took his business’ name for the lunar landing program and wanted press materials as restitution.
National archives, especially Presidential archives, are like a weird form of historical spelunking. Everything that anyone anywhere has ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine