A photo taken during the Orionid meteor shower. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
A Gift From Halley
This weekend, go outside and look up in the dark hours before dawn to witness the annual Orionid meteor shower, which will hit its peak overnight on October 21-22.
You may have seen a few stray meteors zooming across the sky, leftover Draconids whose peak passed earlier this month or leftover meteors from the South Taurid shower that’s still ongoing. But this week, and more specifically th ...read more
(Credit: Stephan Junek)
Pity the cuttlefish that tries to play poker. Where humans might blush when embarrassed or go white when frightened, cuttlefish wear their thoughts on their skins much more literally.
Our own color transformations are caused by nothing more than changes in the blood flowing right under our skin, and it’s a poor marker of what our actual thoughts are. Cuttlefish, by contrast, are covered in up to millions of tiny pigment-filled cells called chromatophores. Muscles ...read more
(Credit: Oleksandr Lipko/Shutterstock)
Dandelion blowing may be about as close to a universal experience as there is. Kids and adults alike delight in huffing the white fluffy seeds from a dried sample of Taraxacum officinale, and watching them fly away.
But as with all things in nature, it only happens that way because it works. Dandelion seeds can travel for miles before setting down, making them particularly efficient fliers. And scientists didn’t really know why. Other plant seeds, s ...read more
Neutron star mergers are believed to generate jets that could produce gamma-ray bursts detected at Earth. This diagram shows each step of the merger process, including the formation of a black hole when the two neutron stars collide and the resulting jet. (Credit: NASA/AEI/ZIB/M. Koppitz and L. Rezzolla)
Co-author Geoffrey Ryan of the University of Maryland (UMD) and the Joint Space-Science Institute, who called the events “cosmic look-alikes,” said, “They look the same, act ...read more
This funky-colored fish was nothing to trifle with: Researchers say newly-described Late Jurassic Piranhamesodon pinnatomus was the piranha of its day. (Credit: Jura Museum)
Jumping right out of nightmares and into my heart (it’s kind of cute, isn’t it?), meet Fincutter, the Bavarian Piranha. Less than three inches long, the Late Jurassic fossil is the earliest ray-finned fish with flesh-ripping teeth — and paleontologists say it was preserved alongside some of its prey.
Piran ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
