Continents Move, Life Evolves
13.7 billion years of evolution in 85 seconds.
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Historians Ask the Public to Help Organize the Past
On November 8, 1800, fire ravaged the federal War Office, in Washington. The agency’s files went up in smoke, leaving a gaping hole in the nation’s historical record. “The most important window into the early republic had basically been boarded up,” says Christopher H. Hamner, a military historian at George Mason University. Not anymore. Through…
Miraculous Conception: Are Planets Forming Without Stars?
One of the most remarkable discoveries about exoplanets—planets that exist outside of our solar system—is that some of them appear to be flying through interstellar space on their own. They’re not orbiting a star, nor are they tied to any other obvious companion. The precise number of these planets—alternately called “free-floating,” “Steppenwolf,” “unbound,” or “rogue”…
Two Galaxies Make Strange Traveling Pair, but Do They Interact?
An unusual pair of galaxies travel through the interstellar cosmos in this striking image obtained by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The unusual pair are jointly called Arp 116, but are composed of a large elliptical galaxy known as M60 and a smaller spiral galaxy called NGC 4647. Although the two galaxies appear to overlap in…
Shedding Light on the Remarkable Properties of Black Holes
Many mysteries surround black holes, but new research led by the Niels Bohr Institute has come up with groundbreaking new theories that might explain several of their more mysterious properties. The new study reveals that black holes have properties that resemble the dynamics of both solids and liquids. Black holes are extremely compact, so compact…
Nine Percent of Today’s Warming Caused By Preindustrial People
Humans started causing climate change long before the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the fossil fuel era. A new study shows that the echoes of the earliest human-caused carbon emissions are still present in our atmosphere. In fact, preindustrial carbon emissions, caused by deforestation as the world’s population grew, were responsible for 9% of…
Sophisticated Mayan Water Management System Revealed
Scientists have identified the largest ancient Mayan dam, constructed from stone and holding back around 20 million gallons of water in a man-made reservoir. The Tikal dam stretched more than 260 feet in length and was 33 feet high, and sheds new light on how the Maya conserved their natural resources for over 1,500 years….