Millions of people around the world were dazzled by the aurora borealis in mid-May — "possibly one of the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years," according to NASA.Now, the huge, still-active sunspot region responsible for the multi-day auroral displays is rotating back into view of Earth. Between about June 4 and 6, it will be in perfect alignment to affect us again, according to Ryan French, a researcher at the National Solar Observatory who investigates solar flares. ...read more
Social networks existed long before Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. But how they formed in ancient times has sometimes stymied scientists. Now, a study in Nature Human Behaviour demonstrates that music played an important role in connecting different hunter-gatherer groups in Central Africa.Central Africa provides a rich trove of history for anthropologists to plumb. Hunter-gatherers have lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. But finding the cultural connectivity that has developed b ...read more
Six monotremes living in the same place at the same time, 100 million years ago at Lightning Ridge, NSw. Clockwise from lower left: Opalios splendens, a newly described species dubbed an ‘echidnapus’; Stirtodon elizabethae, the largest monotreme of the time; Kollikodon ritchiei, with hot-cross-bun shaped molars; Steropodon galmani, now known from additional opalised fossils; Parvopalus clytiei, the smallest monotreme of the time; and Dharragarra aurora, the earliest known species of platypus ...read more
It’s often appropriate to say that a particular practice “isn’t brain surgery” — except when it is. That may be the case in incisions to an ancient Egyptian skull that shows signs of an operation, according to a new study in Frontiers in Medicine.Researchers in the study examined two skulls from the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Collection, curious about the role of cancer in ancient Egypt. In ”Skull 236” (dating from between 2687 and 2345 B.C.E., from a male), microscopic ...read more
One of the strangest looking crocodiles didn’t swim — it walked on land in the Late Cretaceous with a heavy set of interlocking armor and replaceable teeth. “It has a shell on its back similar to armadillos,” says Bruno Borsoni, a master’s student in evolutionary biology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In fact, the extinct species' name — Armadillosuchus arrudai — comes from a combination of the words “armadillo” and “suchus,” which means crocodile in ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine