An exploding meteor that blasted its fragments across California’s Gold Country in April has revealed rare evidence of its origin in a single family of asteroids hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, astronomers report. Seventy-seven bits of space debris collected around Sutter’s Mill in El Dorado County, where they fell on April 22, have…
Winter solstice is the longest night and shortest day of the year. A time of ending and new beginnings as now the days will slowly begin to lengthen again. For Pagans, Solstice is symbolically the night when the Sun Child is reborn out of the womb of Mother Night. For the Mayans, this year marks…
A number of the largest black holes in the universe may be even bigger than previously thought, researchers say. “Ultramassive black holes — that is, black holes with masses exceeding 10 billion solar masses — are probably not rare; several and even dozens of these colossal black holes may exist,” said Stanford astrophysicist Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo….
Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country. American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal, announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that…
A $45 million pot to fund innovative projects that aim to increase government transparency and accountability using web and mobile technology has been unveiled by the U.K., U.S. and Swedish governments. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative in early December to support Internet-based technologies that increase…
A new map that divides the world’s vertebrates into 11 biogeographic realms is the biggest update to a 19th century version, and one of the most important maps for our understanding of global biodiversity. The map was published online in the journal Science. The original map was created by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1876. He divided the…
Fighting may have shaped the evolution of the human hand, according to a new study by a team of University of Utah researchers. The scientists used instruments to measure the forces and acceleration when martial artists hit a punch bag and found that the structure of the fist provides support that increases the ability of…
In a discovery that may prove important for cognitive science, our understanding of nature and applications for robot vision, researchers at the University of Adelaide have found evidence that the dragonfly is capable of higher-level thought processes when hunting its prey. The discovery, published online in the journal Current Biology, is the first evidence that…
We’re about to get a better grasp of one of the biggest ideas in the universe: inflation. The first maps of the cosmos from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite are due out in early 2013. They should help us to hone descriptions of how, after the big bang, the universe grew from smaller than…
Forget beef or even milk. If you’re looking for a sustainable and substantial source of protein, mealworms may be the way to go. Compared to a kilogram of edible protein in meat from cows, chickens or pigs, production of the same amount of mealworm protein emits fewer greenhouse gases and requires much less land to…