A long-toed bird preserved in amber from Myanmar is the first of its kind. (Credit: Lida Xing)
Smaller than a sparrow, a bird that lived 99 million years ago in what's now Southeast Asia had legs unlike any other avian. The bird's hindlimb features one toe longer than its entire lower leg bone.
Lucky for paleontologists, a piece of amber has preserved the animal's odd anatomy.
Found in Burmese amber and identified as new species, Elektorornis chenguangi is known only from one hindl ...read more
The world's most widely-used personality test isn't relevant for much of the world. (Credit: By Gustavo Frazao / Shutterstock)
A lot of contemporary psychology research is based on the assumption that there are five basic dimensions of personality that define people around the world.
It’s called the “Big Five” personality model, and it assumes that each of our personalities are a unique blend of a handful of traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness ...read more
Voyager 2 shut down an instrument heater, but is still going strong, more than forty years after launch. (Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon/STScI)
Launched in 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 are the longest-running spacecraft, still operating at more than 11 billion miles from home, decades after the end of their nominal goal of exploring the outer solar system planets. They still get their power from the same three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, that have served them for years. But with th ...read more
Theories state that some black holes could have formed within the first second of the Big Bang.
(Credit: NASA/ESA and G. Bacon (STScI))
All the black holes that astronomers have seen fall into one
of three categories: stellar-mass black holes, intermediate-mass black holes,
and supermassive black holes. Each is more massive than our Sun and formed at
least hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, as our universe grew
and evolved.
But there is another type of black hole astronom ...read more
The blueheaded wrasse. (Credit: Leonardo Gonzalez/shutterstock)
Sex transitions are commonplace for several species of fish, and that's consistently puzzling for scientists. How these changes occur on a genetic level is still not fully understood, but a new study published in the journal Science offers some insights.
A team of researchers say they've found that social stressors may play a role in triggering a cascade of hormonal changes in the bluehead wrasse, a small, coral-loving fish ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine