The biggest hole formed from a collapsed star in the Milky Way Galaxy resides 2,000 light years away from Earth in the Aquila constellation. Researchers spotted the black hole when they noted the wiggle of a nearby orbiting star. "No one was expecting to find a high-mass black hole lurking nearby, undetected so far," said Pasquale Panuzzo, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris, and one of the study authors, in a press release. "This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research li ...read more
In evolution, competition is thought to be a zero-sum game. One species adapts and survives. Another doesn’t and dies off. A new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution posits that human ancestors might be an exception.Conventional wisdom in evolutionary theory has held that climate has driven the rise and fall of various hominin species. In most vertebrates, interspecies competition also plays an important role. That role has been discounted in human ancestors, according to the study.“We ha ...read more
A father and daughter, searching for fossils on an English beach, found more than they expected: the jawbone of what may be the largest known marine reptile. Scientists estimate that the giant ichthyosaur, from which the jawbone came, measured 80 feet long and lived during the late Triassic period. A report in the journal PLOS details the find. When Justin Reynolds and Ruby Reynolds (then 11) were combing the beach at Somerset in 2020 and came upon a giant bone chunk, they knew they were on to s ...read more
Taking the tube in modern London means using the subway system for transportation. Going down the tube in Holocene-Era Saudi Arabia probably referred to employing underground tunnels for temporary shelter. A new study in the journal PLoS One paints a picture of how human herders lived over the past 7,000 years in a sometimes harsh desert environment. That lifestyle has remained relatively unknown due to poor preservation of organic remains in the region’s arid conditions, until the recent stud ...read more
If you picture a showdown between the chirpy dolphin and the toothy shark, you might imagine a pod ramming into the ocean’s iconic predator enough times to eventually kill it. To see such a predator done in by the animals we perceive as the underdogs certainly makes for a compelling role reversal.“You’ve got these amazingly intelligent, incredible dolphin predators, in social groups with complex social lives, and then the iconic shark,” says Michael Heithaus, a professor in the Departmen ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine