Science

An international team of paleontologists has found a piece of amber containing the beautifully preserved ammonite, several marine and land organisms that lived 99 million years ago (Cretaceous period). The 99-million-year-old piece of amber from northern Myanmar. Image credit: Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology. The ammonite-bearing piece of amber …

  Geologic processes, like your mother, are both fundamentally responsible for life as we know it and probably something you don’t think about very much. (You did call your mother on Sunday, right?) Geologists are interested in the geological activity going on across the solar system because we know these …

  All of humanity currently lives on (or in orbit very near) the planet Earth. A global catastrophe could wipe us all out, but having a “backup” of humanity on other planets would make that impossible. Mars is a natural target for colonization, but what would the first human residents …

E171, a mixture of micro- and nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide (TiO2), is commonly used in high quantities in foods and some medicines as a whitening agent. Found in more than 900 food products such as chewing gum and mayonnaise, E171 is consumed in high proportion everyday by the general …

In Grotta della Basura, a deep cave near Toirano in northern Italy, a team of archaeologists has made a surprising discovery: a number of human hand- and footprints on the clay-rich floor of the cave — evidence that a small and heterogeneous group of Paleolithic people explored the cave 14,000 …

On April 24, 2019, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter captured a new thermal image of Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons. Each color in the full-moon image represents a temperature range detected by Odyssey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera. These three views of the Martian moon Phobos were taken …

Some deep-sea fishes have developed highly sensitive color vision that could help them determine predator from prey in the dimly-lit depths. The lanternfish has bioluminescent organs and an increased number of rod opsin genes. Image credit: Zuzana Musilová, Charles University. Color vision in vertebrates is usually achieved through the interaction …

Bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) over 2,000 years old grow in the forested wetlands along Black River south of Raleigh, North Carolina. One of the trees is at least 2,624-years old, making the bald cypress the oldest-known wetland tree species, the oldest living trees in eastern North America, and the …

  Antibiotics were miracle drugs for most of the 20th century, but they’re no longer a silver bullet that can treat any infection. Overuse of antibiotics has fostered the proliferation of resistant organisms that can prove life-threatening, especially to those with already weakened immune systems. A teenager in the UK …

Gravitational waves are ‘ripples’ in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. New research shows those waves leave behind plenty of ‘memories’ that could help detect them …