Science

An international team of astronomers has found exciting new evidence for Lense-Thirring precession — an effect of relativistic frame-dragging — after tracking the pulsar-white dwarf binary system PSR J1141-6545 for almost two decades. An artist’s depiction of a rapidly spinning neutron star and a white dwarf dragging the fabric of …

  After a series of weather-related delays, SpaceX has successfully launched another batch of Starlink internet satellites. This payload of 60 satellites brings SpaceX’s total count to 240, putting it even farther in the lead as the world’s largest satellite operator. Naturally, SpaceX also recovered the first stage booster for …

According to new research, opposing desires to congregate and maintain some personal space drive fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to form orderly social clusters. Drosophila melanogaster. Image credit: Botaurus. Many animals ranging from swarming insects to wildebeests form large, orderly groups. This collective behavior is often crucial to survival. It may …

  As we peer out into the universe in search of other worlds, we’ve spotted many gas giants orbiting close to their home stars. These so-called “hot Jupiters” have extreme environments, but the planet KELT-9b is in a class of its own. This is the hottest exoplanet ever discovered, and …

Neanderthals were once widespread across Europe and western Asia. They also penetrated into the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, but the geographical origin of these populations and the timing of their dispersal remain elusive. Archaeologists excavating Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai foothills have found 90,000 stone artifacts, numerous bone tools, …

A team of researchers has sequenced and analyzed the genomes of Polistes fuscatus, a species of paper wasp that has uniquely evolved visual individual recognition abilities, and two closely related species lacking facial recognition, Polistes metricus and Polistes dorsalis. Their findings suggest Polistes fuscatus‘ increasing intelligence provided an evolutionary advantage …

Light exposure regulates how two kinds of fat cells (adipocytes) work together to produce the raw materials that all other cells use for energy, according to a new study conducted in mice. White fat cells (adipocytes) activate the lipolysis pathway to produce the free fatty acids that are used as …

A team of researchers from the University of Washington and NASA’s Ames Research Center has analyzed iron-rich micrometeorites collected from 2.7 billion-year-old (Archean Eon) limestone in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and found that these tiny space rocks encountered a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere on their journey to the planet’s …

  A decade ago, NASA, CERN, and dozens of other institutions banded together to build the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) at a cost of $2 billion. This advanced instrument has helped scientists study dark matter from its perch on the International Space Station, but components have started failing in recent …

A new species of carnivorous theropod dinosaur has been identified from the fossilized remains discovered in the 1990s in northeastern Utah and Wyoming, the United States. A group of Allosaurus jimmadseni attacks a juvenile sauropod dinosaur. Image credit: Todd Marshall. The newly-discovered dinosaur belongs to Allosauridae, a group of small to …