Scientists are using funhouse images of faraway galaxies to learn how dark matter shaped the cosmos we see today.
The feet of pond skaters have helped create a novel super-buoyant material. Finnish scientists have drawn on the structure of the insect’s foot to exploit its ability to let the creature skim across a pond’s surface. The buoyancy of the material, comprised of substances in which the liquid has been replaced with a gas but…
Deep beneath the ocean floor off the Pacific Northwest coast, scientists have described the existence of a potentially vast realm of life, one almost completely disconnected from the world above. Persisting in microscopic cracks in the basalt rocks of Earth’s oceanic crust is a complex microbial ecosystem fueled entirely by chemical reactions with rocks and…
As the planet warms, the Arctic is feeling the heat. Trees and shrubs are taking hold on what was once tundra, like this young pine and surrounding shrubs in Norway’s Arctic Finnmark. A new international study of the satellite record of greening landscape shows that the places which were firmly Arctic in climate during the…
Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence yet for a 13.2-billion-year old galaxy, a finding that provides a key piece of information about the universe’s early childhood. “This is the most distant (galaxy) identified with high confidence,” astronomer Wei Zheng, with Johns Hopkins University, told Discovery News. “If our current universe is a man of 70…
A group of researchers led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has discovered the first scientific evidence of genetic blending between Europeans and Asians in the remains of ancient Scythian warriors living over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia. Contrary to what was believed until now, the results published in PLoS ONE…
There is, in this crazy world, one thing we know for sure: Our world is the world. Our planet is the planet — for creating life, for supporting life, for letting us humans and our fellow species become what we are. And so, as we take our first tentative steps from a warm, watery Earth…