Astronomers may have, for the first time, directly imaged a planet still in the process of formation, gathering material from a debris disk surrounding its parent star.
Around the cosmos, black holes aren’t known for being the nicest neighbors. They tend to make their presence felt in unpleasant ways, pulling nearby matter inward even as they belch out violent blasts of plasma and radiation. Put two of them in the same neighborhood and the resulting tug-of-war can quickly turn ugly. But in…
Extinctions during the early Triassic period left Earth a virtual wasteland, largely because life literally couldn’t take the heat, a new study suggests. Between 247 to 252 million years ago, Earth was reeling from a mass extinction called the end-Permian event. The die-off had wiped out most life on Earth, including most land plants. The…
Pollution is leading thunderstorm clouds to capture heat, increasing global warming in a way that climate models have failed to take into account. It strengthens them, causing their anvil-shaped tops to spread out high in the atmosphere and capture heat, especially at night, says Jiwen Fan of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory….
In the last few weeks major reports by the International Energy Agency and the UN Environment Programme have concluded that we can still meet the UN’s target of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But climate scientists are far less optimistic. Many say the chance to avoid a 2 degrees Celsius rise…
Researchers said a new computerized model of part of a rat’s cortex predicts connections between neurons, which could help explain how the brains of mammals — including humans — work. “This is a major breakthrough because it would otherwise take decades, if not centuries, to map the location of each synapse in the brain,” said…
A mother’s willingness to sacrifice her own health and safety for the sake of her children is a common narrative across cultures — and by no means unique to humans alone. Female polar bears starve, dolphin mothers stop sleeping and some spider moms give themselves as lunch for their crawly babies’ first meal. Now an…