Science

A new species of ancient whale ancestor has been identified from a fossilized skeleton found in Peru. This illustration shows an artistic reconstruction of two individuals of Peregocetus pacificus, one standing along the rocky shore of nowadays Peru and the other preying upon sparid fish. Image credit: A. Gennari. Named …

The world-famous Terracotta Army of Xi’an is an array of life-sized, realistic ceramic figures representing warriors, stationed in three large pits within the mausoleum of Qin Shihuang (259-210 BCE), the first emperor of a unified China. Over two thousand ceramic warriors have been excavated so far, and it is estimated …

  Today is a big day for humanity. We have bombed an asteroid, finally exacting revenge for what the asteroids did to the dinosaurs. There’s a valid scientific reason, too. The Japanese Hayabusa 2 spacecraft is collecting material from the asteroid Ryugu, and blasting it with a massive kinetic projectile is …

  All technologically advanced nations have at least a few space-based assets. In modern military conflict, those objects could become targets. Several countries have conducted tests with satellite-killing weapons, most recently India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced last week that the Mission Shakti test had successfully destroyed a satellite in …

  Back in 2013, NASA’s Mars probe Curiosity reported detecting methane on Mars. This was a significant finding — methane has been periodically detected on Mars at various points, but the gas has always vanished thereafter. Long periods of time have passed without any methane being detected in the atmosphere at …

A research team led by scientists from the University of California, Davis, has used a unique approach to sequence the genomes of the English walnut (Juglans regia) and its wild North American relative, the little walnut (Juglans microcarpa), by tapping into the capabilities of two state-of-the-art technologies: long-read DNA sequencing …

The discovery of life on Mars would get pretty much everyone excited. But the scientists hunting for it would probably be happy no matter what the outcome of their search — whether life turned out to extinct, dormant or extant. They’d even consider finding no evidence of life whatsoever to …

An international team of scientists has reconstructed the tree of life for all major lineages of passerines (perching birds). The Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus). Image credit: Francis Franklin / CC BY-SA 4.0. The team, led by Louisiana State University researcher Carl Oliveros, extracted and sequenced DNA from 221 specimens …

At a site dubbed Tanis in North Dakota’s Hell Creek Formation, paleontologists have unearthed an assemblage of exquisitely-preserved fossilized organisms — fish stacked one atop another and mixed in with burned tree trunks, conifer branches, mammals, mosasaur bones, insects, the partial carcass of a Triceratops, marine microorganisms called dinoflagellates and …

Mars is dry today, but numerous ancient rivers are found across the planet’s surface and their existence is a challenge to models of planetary climate evolution. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, catalogued these rivers to conclude that the runoff production persisted until less than three billion …