About seven years from now, in 2032, an asteroid orbiting the Sun will fly so close to Earth that it has a little over 1 percent chance of impact. The asteroid, named 2024 YR4, stands out as the only near-Earth asteroid out of the over 37,000 currently recognized to have an impact probability above 1 percent. Scientists calculated this probability after the asteroid was reported on December 27, 2024 at a telescope in Chile belonging to the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), ...read more
At long last, the Eaton and Palisades wildfires in Los Angeles are almost fully contained.It has been more than three weeks since the blazes erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, and now, as I'm writing this on Friday, Jan. 31, they are finally just a percent or two from full containment, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Driven by hurricane force winds, the fires quickly roared through a desiccated landscape. Together they've scorched 37,469 acres — an area more than ...read more
Although we often associate dogs as man’s best friend, new information suggests that sheep may have been by our side all along.A team of geneticists and zooarchaeologists in Europe have analyzed 188 genomes from a selection of domestic and wild sheep bones from across the past 12,000 years. In these samples, they discovered that sheep have existed alongside humans during many important transitional phases in our history. “This research demonstrates how the relationship between humans and sh ...read more
One of the unsung foundations of modern civilization is the ability to detect oscillating fields, be they radio waves, visible light, x-rays, magnetic fields, gravitational waves among the countless varieties. It is no exaggeration to say that our 21st century lives depend on this ability. So it should come as no surprise that physicists would like to do this with ever increasing accuracy and sensitivity. In recent years, they have learned how to use the strange properties of quantum particles t ...read more
Researchers have discovered mysterious new microbes that colonize the microscopic world inside our mouths and digestive tracts.These obelisks, as they've been named, are minuscule bits of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that serve an unknown function, even though their presence could be widespread in the microbiome, according to a recent study published recently in Cell. Obelisks and ViroidsIt’s unclear exactly what obelisks are — even the researchers who discovered them still know very little. Ivan ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine