If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks. Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho. These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will…
Early dinosaurs probably looked a lot more like Big Bird than scientists once suspected. A newly discovered, nearly complete fossilized skeleton hints that all dinosaurs may have sported feathers. Researchers have found feathered dinosaurs before, but this one is more distantly related to birds than any previously discovered. Called Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, it belongs to a…
Frank Sinatra would have been happy to learn that a U.K. company called Excalibur Almaz wants to literally fly folks to the Moon and back again. The catch—it’ll cost a cool $150 million per ticket for a trip around Earth’s satellite and you’ll be flying in refurbished Soviet-era spacecraft built back in the 1970s. The…
Physicists in Europe will present evidence of an entirely new particle on July 4, Nature has learned. But more data will be needed to officially confirm whether it is indeed the long-awaited Higgs boson — the particle thought to be behind the mass of all the others. Even as rumours fly in the popular media,…
Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) reported in the journal Nature Climate Change encouraging new findings that some fish may be less vulnerable to high CO2 and an acidifying ocean than previously feared. “Human activity is expected to increase the acidity of the world’s oceans by 0.3 to 0.4…
A team of scientists from Arizona State University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences found out that by returning to the nest some aging bees could learn new things.
A few strands of DNA could help solve the mystery of dark matter. A newly proposed detector aims to use DNA to resolve the conflicting claims from current dark matter detectors. Dark matter is thought to make up about 85% of the matter in the universe. The prime suspects are so-called weakly interacting massive particles,…
Hints of the Higgs boson detected last year by a US “atom smasher” have become even stronger, scientists have said. The news comes amid fevered speculation just two days before an announcement by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider. Finding the particle would fill a glaring hole in the widely accepted theory of how the…
A new study indicates that mass extinctions affect the pace of evolution, not just in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, but for millions of years to follow. The study’s authors, University of Chicago’s Andrew Z. Krug and David Jablonski, will publish their findings in the August issue of the journal Geology. Scientists expected to see…
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care reform law has an impact in the form of key provisions that will impact US science funding in the years to come.