Evidence is mounting that modern birds descended from gliding, feathered non-avian dinosaurs. Two dinosaurs could be candidates for the bottom of the bird family tree, and each helps to reveal how feathers first evolved. “The oldest known feathered dinosaurs would be Anchiornis (155 million years ago) and Epidexipteryx (between 152 million and 168 million years…
Within supersized alien versions of Earth, a common transparent ceramic may become a flowing liquid metal, perhaps granting those distant worlds magnetic fields to shield life from harmful radiation, researchers say. Among the hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that astronomers have discovered in recent years are so-called “super-Earths,” which are rocky planets like Earth…
Much of the internet is buzzing over upcoming “big news” from NASA’s Curiosity rover, but the space agency’s scientists are keeping quiet about the details. The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil…
The American Indian Student Union at the University of Virginia has upset some conservative students on campus with an “Anti-Thanksgiving” event. The student group planned and advertised the “Anti-Thanksgiving” event as a potluck where students would “share free food.” They also recently held a screening of “The Only Good Indian,” a film about a Native…
A smattering of white spots found among the ink in medieval books aren’t just printing errors — they’re actually an amazingly detailed “fossil” record of European beetles, new research finds. The dots represent spots, or wormholes, where hatching beetles chewed their way out of the woodblocks used to print art and illustrations between the 1400s…
A study using a unique new instrument on the world’s largest optical telescope has revealed the likely origins of especially bright supernovae that astronomers use as easy-to-spot “mile markers” to measure the expansion and acceleration of the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe observations of recent supernova 2011fe that…
For the first time, ESA’s Planck space telescope has detected a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters 10 million light-years apart. Abell 399 and Abell 401, each containing hundreds of galaxies, are billions of light years away. The presence of hot gas linking them had already been hinted at in X-ray…
You know we’ve found something new and interesting when scientists don’t really know how to classify it. Using the Subaru Telescope an international team of astronomers has discovered a “super-Jupiter” so massive that it seems they’re not quite sure whether to call it a planet or a low-mass brown dwarf (in other words, a star…
A team of NASA scientists and their colleagues have found evidence from meteorites that Mars and Earth had a similar origin, but then the two planets evolved quite differently. Based on their analyses of two Martian meteorites, researchers have concluded that water in the Martian interior originated from planetary building blocks similar to those that…
China, India, South Africa and Brazil said a climate deal planned for 2020 won’t be a “new regime,” threatening confrontation with the U.S. which wants to eliminate a firewall between developed and developing nations. The four nations reined in expectations for the Durban Platform, a mandate agreed last December at United Nations treaty talks in…