What ever happened to the Goldilocks planet? It was big news back in September 2010 when a group led by Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science said they had discovered a small planet circling a small red star in the constellation…
Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey. Or so an intergalactic photo finish may suggest. Physicist Robert Nemiroff reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that were recorded by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009. The photons originated about 7 billion light…
Scientists have long suspected that the Sun’s 11-year cycle influences climate of certain regions on Earth. Yet records of average, seasonal temperatures do not date back far enough to confirm any patterns. Now, armed with a unique proxy, an international team of researchers show that unusually cold winters in Central Europe are related to low…
This month we are expecting to see a record ice melt in the Arctic. But this is not a world record we can celebrate. This is a wake-up call from planet Earth. The Arctic is home to millions of people, including Inuit whose ancestors first settled thousands of years ago. It is also a unique…
By using novel methods developed for tracing the origins of virus outbreaks, researchers say they have identified present-day Turkey as the homeland of the Indo-European language family. The international team used computational methods analyzing words from more than 100 ancient and contemporary languages, as well as geographical and historical data. By doing so, the scientists…
The recent Antarctic Peninsula temperature rise and associated ice loss is unusual but not unprecedented, according to research. Analysis of a 364m-long ice core containing several millennia of climate history shows the region previously basked in temperatures slightly higher than today. However, the peninsula is now warming rapidly, threatening previously stable areas of ice, the…
It’s an old party trick—sucking helium from balloons so you can sing like a Wizard of Oz munchkin. When gibbons inhale this non-toxic gas, researchers can detect much more sophisticated impersonations. It turns out that gibbon vocalization techniques mirror those of highly trained soprano opera singers. “We’ve shown how the gibbons’ distinctive song uses the…
Human and chimp brains look anatomically similar because both evolved from the same ancestor millions of years ago. But where does the chimp brain end and the human brain begin? A new UCLA study pinpoints uniquely human patterns of gene activity in the brain that could shed light on how we evolved differently than our…
Research presented at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly has found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, a rare sight in the local Universe. The Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy on its own, but when paired with its close neighbours – the Magellanic Clouds – it is very rare,…
An ancient Roman lead scroll unearthed in England three years ago has turned out to be a curse intended to cause misfortune to more than a dozen people, according to new research. Found in East Farleigh, U.K., in the filling of a 3rd to 4th Century AD building that may have originally been a temple,…