Science

  NASA’s InSight lander doesn’t get as much attention as the Curiosity rover, but it has been on Mars and making history for almost a year. It’s sent back weather reports from the red planet, recorded the ghostly sounds of the Martian wind, and deployed the first-ever seismometer on another …

  We’ve known about the likely presence of ice reserves on the Moon for decades, but we haven’t actually sent a dedicated ground-based probe to check our nearest neighbor. Instead, the presence of water ice in shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole has been intuited from various space-based measurements …

As part of the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes (1KP) Initiative, an international consortium of scientists has sequenced transcriptomes — the set of genes that is actively expressed — of 1,124 plant species to shine a light on one-billion-year history of green plants. Diversity within the family Viridiplantae: (a-e) green algae …

  In 2017, scientists around the world were excited by the news that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project had detected gravitational waves from the collision of two neutron stars. This discovery confirmed a pivotal prediction of general relativity, and eventually earned multiple Nobel Prizes. A new study now …

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity snapped a view of itself and its surroundings on October 11, 2019 (the 2,553rd Martian day, or Sol, of its mission). The selfie (high-resolution version) is composed of 57 individual images taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera on the end of …

White sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are top marine predators that are typically solitary but can also form seasonal aggregations around seal colonies to feed. Using a combination of photo-identification and network analysis, a team of researchers investigated the co-occurrence patterns of the marine predators. The study showed, for the first time, …

  One of the major unanswered questions in astronomy is how our modern system of galaxies evolved into its present-day configuration in the first place. Now, researchers have found evidence of a massive galaxy that formed when the universe was far younger than it today, with a very different configuration …

Paleontologists have discovered the fossils of a new type of early tetrapod (four-limbed vertebrate) in the Komi Republic. Dubbed Parmastega aelidae, the ancient creature lived about 372 million years ago (Devonian period) and was an aquatic, surface-cruising animal. An artist’s reconstruction of the Devonian-period Sosnogorsk lagoon just before a storm. Image …

In a new paper published this month in the journal Physical Review D, a duo of theoretical physicists from Case Western Reserve University, the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences and Yangzhou University described a technique for detecting traversable wormholes — theoretical portals through space-time that could create …

The end-Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago eradicated roughly 75% of the animal and plant species on Earth, including whole groups like non-avian dinosaurs and ammonites. Debate lingers over what caused this extinction event, with intense volcanic activity in India’s Deccan Traps and the asteroid strike off Mexico’s Yucatan …