Science

A team of researchers from Yale University, the University of Oviedo in Spain, the Galapagos Conservancy, and the Galapagos National Park Service has sequenced and analyzed the genomes of Lonesome George — the iconic last member of the Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii) — and the Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea), …

Our local star is very bright by human standards—just looking at it for a few seconds can wreck your vision. That’s just an infinitesimal fraction of the total brightness of the universe. How bright is it? Well, we finally have an answer to that. Using new measurement techniques, researchers have …

The Archbasilica of St John Lateran is the cathedral church in the city of Rome, Italy. It is the oldest and highest ranking of the four papal major basilicas, giving it the unique title of ‘Archbasilica.’ The church was originally built in the 4th century CE by Constantine the Great, …

The twin LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy, have detected four new gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime. The collision of two black holes is seen in this still from a computer …

After traveling through space for more than two years and 1.2 billion miles (2 billion km), NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft arrived at its destination — asteroid Bennu (formerly 1999 RQ36) — on December 3, 2018. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on a mission to explore …

After two years in space, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe has reached its destination: the asteroid Bennu. The rendezvous is already a significant achievement, but the mission is far from over. Eventually, OSIRIS-REx will graze the surface of Bennu to pick up a tiny bit of material to send back to Earth. …

Manta rays and their relatives of the family Myliobatidae have massive, flapping fins as well as a pair of fleshy projections called cephalic lobes. A new study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, shows that these two very different features have the same origin — a discovery …

Physicists using the FIONA (For the Identification Of Nuclide A) device at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 88-inch Cyclotron have performed the first direct measurements of the mass numbers for the nuclei of nihonium (Nh, element 113) and moscovium (Mc, element 115). Left: average of known decay …

On November 26, 2018, NASA’s InSight probe touched down on the western side of a flat, smooth expanse of lava called Elysium Planitia. Now the mission team has determined that the lander sits slightly tilted in a sand-filled impact crater. InSight flipped open the lens cover on its Instrument Context …

A team of U.S. paleontologists has described a remarkable new species of whale that lived about 33 million years ago (Oligocene epoch). The researchers found that this toothless whale, named Maiabalaena nesbittae, had no baleen, showing a surprising intermediary step between the baleen whales that live today and their toothed …