NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies. Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. These powerful galaxies that burn…
Fossil evidence suggests a feathered but flightless dinosaur was able to snag and consume smaller flying dinosaurs, Canadian paleontologists say. A University of Alberta paleontology team has found the fossilized remains of three flying dinosaurs in the belly of a raptor-like predator called Sinocalliopteryx. Sinocalliopteryx was about 6 feet long and roughly the size of…
Scientists have produced a digital image of a genome tens of thousands of years old with the resolution of a typical living person’s, enabling them to describe the life and history of the ancient humans in great detail, they reported in Science magazine. Led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,…
Two Stone Age statuettes, one depicting a ram and the other a wild bovine, have emerged from the highway connecting Jerusalem with Tel Aviv. Found at Tel Moza, a couple miles north of Jerusalem, during a dig ahead of the widening of Highway 1, the 5.9-inch-long figurines are estimated to date between 9,000 and 9,500…
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the right…
Astronomers have for the first time discovered two alien planets whirling around a pair of stars: a complete solar system with twin suns just like Luke Skywalker’s fictional home world Tatooine. Most stars like our sun are not singletons, but rather come in pairs that orbit each other. Scientists had found planets in these binary…
Roughly 230 million years ago, two mites and a midge got stuck in oozing resin from a now-extinct species of conifer tree in the mountains of northeastern Italy. They never moved again. Despite their ignoble deaths, the insects have now earned the distinction of being the oldest arthropods — invertebrates that include insects, arachnids, and…
The total mass of life on Earth may be one-third less than thought, altering how active we think life on our planet is, researchers say. Past estimates of how much life there is on Earth suggested living organisms store about 1 trillion tons of carbon, of which about 30% dwells in single-celled microbes in the…
Tokyo Institute of Technology researchers have shown simpler versions of the universal genetic code can still function in protein synthesis. In addition to understanding early primordial organisms, the research could lead to applications preventing non-natural genetically modified materials from entering the natural world.
Astronomers have for the first time observed a nova-producing system turn into a supernova, a finding that indicates the universe has more than one way to create a nova. A normal Type Ia supernova is a rare event, occurring perhaps once or twice every century. The type of supernova observed by a team of astronomers…