Science

A varieties of archaea called Metallosphaera sedula can development on stony meteorites, using steels entraped within these extraterrestrial items as the single power resource, according to brand-new research study led by University of Vienna astrobiologists. SEM picture revealing Metallosphaera sedula cells conquering the surface area of the NWA 1172 fragments. …

  NASA’s Parker Solar Probe started making history the very minute it launched, taking the crown as the fastest moving launch in history. It went on to pass closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft, and now NASA has released the results of scans made during the probe’s first …

Paleontologists in Lebanon have discovered the extremely well-preserved fossilized remains of a previously unknown Cretaceous-period flying reptile. Life reconstruction of Mimodactylus libanensis. Image credit: Julius T. Csotonyi. Pterosaurs were highly successful flying reptiles — not dinosaurs, as they’re commonly mislabeled — that lived at the same time as nonavian dinosaurs, …

Ancient Australia’s super-sized animals, the megafauna, became extinct about 42,000 years ago, but the role of humans in their demise has been debated for decades. New research challenges the notion built from previous studies that our species was the principal driver of extinctions in Australia, and that climate change was …

Extra-virgin olive oil, a major component of the Mediterranean diet, is rich in cell-protecting antioxidants and known for its multiple health benefits. Previous studies in mice showed that extra-virgin olive oil preserves memory and protects the brain against Alzheimer’s disease. In the new animal study, a team of researchers from …

  Scientists have found many truly massive black holes in the cosmos, some of which weigh in at millions of billions of times the mass of our sun. These monsters lurk at the heart of galaxies like the Milky Way and M87, but smaller stellar-mass black holes can be anyplace. …

Six new species of dragonflies that lived about 50 million years ago (early Eocene epoch) have been identified from fossils found in the Okanagan Highlands, an elevated hilly plateau area in British Columbia, Canada, and the U.S. state of Washington. Ypshna brownleei, an image reversed left/right so that wing apices …

Paleontologists in China have unearthed a nearly complete skeleton of a previously unknown Cretaceous mammal species with well-preserved middle ear bones. A life reconstruction of the Cretaceous multituberculate Jeholbaatar kielanae. Image credit: Yong Xu. The ancient creature is a multituberculate mammal (order Multituberculata), a distant relative of today’s rodents. Named …

Tufted puffins (Fratercula cirrhata) possess large bills and are members of the bird family with energetically expensive flight. In a new study, a team of researchers from Canada and the United States used infrared thermography to test whether wild tufted puffins use their bills to dissipate excess heat after flight. …

Majungasaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur that lived approximately 70 million years ago (Cretaceous period) in what is now Madagascar, grew new teeth roughly 2 to 13 times faster than those of other predatory dinosaurs, according to new research. Two individuals of Majungasaurus chasing Rapetosaurus, with Masiakasaurus in the foreground. Image credit: …