Science

  Jupiter’s Great Red Spot gets most of the attention when it comes to gas giant spots, but astronomers are particularly interested in what’s been happening on Neptune lately. After seeing several dark vortexes appear in the ice giant’s clouds over the decades, scientists have finally been able to watch …

The world’s biggest known Tyrannosaurus rex — one of the largest and most fearsome carnivores of all time — lived about 66 million years ago (Cretaceous period) in what is now Saskatchewan, Canada. Scotty is the largest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Canada. Image credit: Amanda Kelley. Scotty was 42.7 …

Stimulation with ultrafast light pulses can realize and manipulate states of matter with emergent structural, electronic and magnetic phenomena. According to a new study, published in the journal Nature Materials, an ultrafast laser pulse plus ‘frustration’ resulted in a new state of matter — a ‘supercrystal.’ A 3D image of …

Animal life exploded in diversity and form during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. An international team of paleontologists has discovered an early Cambrian fossil site in China — the Qingjiang biota — that contains a variety of specimens, more than half of which are previously undescribed. The …

  The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA are collaborating on a new experiment that seeks to understand the effects of long-term weightlessness and artificial gravity on the human body. However, this experiment won’t take place in space. Two-dozen brave volunteers will lie down and remain there. Lying around may …

Sleeping in a few extra hours on the weekends might not be enough to combat the self-incurred damage from weekday sleep deprivation. According to a study from the University of Colorado Boulder, sleep restriction for just a 5-days dysregulated the internal circadian clock and increased late-night caloric intake, leading to …

  The monster black hole that anchors our galaxy is safely 28,000 light years away from Earth. That’s a good thing, too. The region around that back hole is overflowing with dangerous radiation and fragmented stars. Astronomers observing the center of the Milky Way have spotted some unusual features that …

In June 2018, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft and sample return mission Hayabsua-2 arrived at the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu. The first scientific results from the mission, published this week in a trio of papers in the journal Science, portray Ryugu as a porous ‘pile of rubble.’ This …

A team of planetary scientists at the Australian National University found that our planet is made of the same elements as the Sun but has less of the volatile elements such as hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen. Wang et al compared new protosolar elemental abundances with recent estimates of bulk …

Physicists from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN have observed, for the first time, the matter-antimatter asymmetry known as charge-parity (CP) violation in the decays of a D0 meson, a subatomic particle made up of a charm quark and an up antiquark. The LHCb magnet. Image credit: …