The newly discovered Phoenix cluster may be one of the most extreme objects ever observed, being among the most massive, luminous, and productive clusters in the universe. Located about 5.7 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, it has a mass roughly 2,500 trillion times that of the sun. Distributed between the galaxies in…
Scientists taking advantage of the versatility and new capabilities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, have observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons, from the seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons…
Humans could be the only animals that are sensitive to fairness, suggests a new Royal Society Biology Letters study. It’s not that other animals are unfair. They just don’t seem to care as much about fairness as we do, or so this and other research concludes. Ingrid Kaiser of the University of Heidelberg and colleagues…
The primordial particles of matter that existed just after the big bang are now being re-created in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to advance understanding of the kind of matter that existed in the first seconds of the universe. Seconds after the big bang, quarks and gluons — basic building blocks of matter — were…
Archaeologists date relic, found in dig near Jerusalem, to the 12th century B.C.
Human history more than matches the best soap operas and Hollywood thrillers. The latest blockbuster is a tale of sex and war on an epic scale but from an era that pre-dates conventional historical analysis. It comes from the world of anthropology where researchers are piecing together the twists and turns using the latest genome…
For centuries, the people of the Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific Ocean have crafted weapons from shark teeth. Joshua Drew, a conservation biologist at Columbia University in New York, has used these teeth to show that the waters around the islands were once home to three species of shark that no longer live in…
As it turns out, Mars and Earth may be more similar than previously thought in one momentous way: Mars appears to have plate tectonics —giant pieces of the planet’s crust that move, break apart and smash into each other, forming such features as mountains, canyons and volcanoes — and experiences earthquakes, according to a new…
After a full week on the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is celebrating with a little rest and relaxation. The 1-ton rover began beaming home photos and testing out its 10 science instruments almost immediately after its dramatic landing on Mars on the night of Aug. 5. But Curiosity is now in the middle…
A first-of-its-kind “crowdsourced and crowdfunded” archaeological dig at Cambridgeshire’s Flag Fen has finished. It is the site of a Bronze-Age “causeway” of millions of preserved timbers that are rotting away as groundwater recedes from the site. The not-for-profit Digventures team raised £27,000 from members of the public who then joined in an expert-led dig to…