Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark…
Scientists are developing a salt-resistant variety of rice, a move prompted, in part, by last year’s Japan tsunami, which flooded some 20,000 hectares of rice paddies. The rice varieties Japanese farmers were growing in those paddies couldn’t survive in salt-contaminated soil. The new method hones in on the precise changes in a gene responsible for…
Six world-renowned scientists explain the history of the universe and reflect on how this knowledge affects their perspective of the universe and our place in it.
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dinosaur nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said. The hatchery and the baby footprints around it are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough…
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet. The major EU-funded initiative will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory…
Intuitive reasoning may help explain why some people are more accepting of evolution than others.
For the first time, scientists have caught a glimpse of a comet’s final minutes before it was vaporized by the sun. The comet was flying at about 1.4 million miles an hour.
The leap second may live on for at least another three years. Once or twice a year, the leap second can be tacked on to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with the Earth’s rotational cycle, which does not run quite like clockwork. Without the leap second, atomic clocks would diverge about…
Why does our universe look the way it does? In particular, why do we only experience three spatial dimensions in our universe, when superstring theory, for instance, claims that there are ten dimensions — nine spatial dimensions and a tenth dimension of time? Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged…
Examining four animal groups with high relative brain size, and finding that they have a variety of qualities in common even though they have very different evolutionary histories and live in different environments.