Amir D. Aczel blogs about physics and cosmology for Discover’s Crux: If somebody told you that there are angels floating in space, observing our world and forming their impressions of our everyday reality, you would think that this person is nuts—a religious fanatic with an active imagination, and certainly not a scientist. Scientists, as we…
The only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals are apparently sub-Saharan Africans, researchers say. New findings, detailed in the journal PLoS ONE, suggest modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, modern humanity’s closest known extinct relatives. Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human lineage, others once roamed…
Bulgarian archaeologists have found what they believe to be the oldest town in Europe, a salt production center called Solnitsata near the modern-day city of Provadia. Although the 6-millenium-old town held only 350 people or so, it was apparently very wealthy because it supplied salt to much of what is now the Balkans. The town…
A newly spotted ultra-bright star explosion burst onto the scene just 1.5 billion years after the big bang, making it the earliest known supernova. The event is one of two supernovae recently found in the distant universe. The other occurred a mere 3 billion years after the birth of the cosmos. Both explosions are so-called…
The Space Shuttle may have taken its final, valedictory tour across the United States, but that’s no reason to think that our exploration of the heavens is over. The Space Race — both in terms of manned travel and remote sensing expeditions — is as competitive now as during the days of Sputnik. Some new…
Nasa’s Curiosity rover has found soil on Mars to be similar to Hawaii’s after sifting and scanning its first sample on the Red Planet. The robot’s CheMin instrument shook out fine particles of soil and fired X-rays at them to determine their composition. These sandy samples should give clues about Mars’ recent geological history. As…
One place you don’t expect to see waves lapping against the shore is in the middle of a desert. But that’s exactly what’s happening deep inside the United Arab Emirates, where a recently formed lake is nestled into the sand dunes, and a new ecosystem is emerging. Dave Clark, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological…
The Cretaceous Period of Earth history ended with a mass extinction that wiped out numerous species, most famously the dinosaurs. A new study now finds that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Researchers published their findings online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The…
Opsins, the light-sensitive proteins key to vision, may have evolved earlier and undergone fewer genetic changes than previously believed, according to a new study from the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the University of Bristol recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The study, which used computer modelling to provide a detailed…
After having launched the space rover Curiosity to Mars, researchers at NASA are now planning to send people to the red planet. Work has begun at Michoud Assembly Facility to find ways by which Mars could be made a reachable planet. It has been reported that the Boeing engineers have been given the responsibility to…