A pulsar that randomly and without warning dramatically changes its pattern of radio wave and X-ray emissions has surprised a team of astronomers, who wrote that it “challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories.” Pulsars are spinning stars the size of a small city, with a mass roughly comparable to our Sun. They have a strong…
In an upcoming paper for the journal Aquatic Mammals, a pair of scientists detail a series of interactions between an adult bottlenose dolphin with scoliosis and a group of sperm whales in the Azores. The scientists describe their research as the first time sperm whales have been observed interacting in a non-aggressive way with a…
Our first foray into laser-equipped combat aircraft was the Airborne Laser Testbed, a Boeing 747 with a gigantic chemically-pumped megawatt laser turret in its nose. It was pretty awesome from a conceptual standpoint, but it didn’t work very well, and was scrapped last year. This doesn’t mean that the idea of high-powered lasers on aircraft…
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the famed constellation Orion is on a collision course with a strange wall of interstellar dust, with the clock ticking down to a cataclysmic cosmic smashup in 5,000 years, scientists say. A new image of Betelgeuse suggests the star will crash headlong into a trail of space dust while…
Birds and humans use stars to navigate, but can insects map their routes? For dung beetles, a new study says the answer is yes. The African insects appear to find their way via the Milky Way. It’s the first evidence that any insect can orientate themselves with the sky, and the first evidence that any…
Praying, fighting, dancing, chanting — human rituals could illuminate the growth of community and the origins of civilization.
How many protons can dance on the head of a pin? The answer is nowhere near as straightforward as one may think — and it might offer new insights into one of the most well-tested theories in physics. An international team of scientists recently tried to find out the actual size of a proton, one…
A feathered dinosaur fossil about 12 inches long is older than bird-like dinosaurs from which birds are thought to have evolved, British paleontologists say. The discovery of the new bird-like dinosaur from the Jurassic period, dubbed Eosinopteryx, presents a challenge to widely accepted theories on the origin of flight, they said. The fossilized remains found…
The robot equipment industry has one word for the alarmist articles and television news programs that predict a robot is about to steal your job: Fiddlesticks! Well, that wasn’t actually the word used at the Automate 2013 trade show held recently in Chicago, but the sentiment was the same. During one presentation, Henrik I. Christensen,…
The stuff we’re made of may be the means by which we store information that we want kept around long after we’re gone. Scientists have developed a technique of storing information in DNA, the molecule found in living creatures including humans that contains genetic instructions. The experiment is discussed in a new study in the…