A mounted skeleton of the Buesching mastodon.Photo: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography Researchers have detailed the grisly life and death of a male behemoth that died 13,200 years ago by examining the chemical makeup of one of its tusks. The defense revealed that the behemoth grew up in the Great Lakes region and later in life … Read more
E. coli cells used in the Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) on an agar plate.Credit: Jeffrey Barrick On February 24, 1988, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski filled 12 flasks with sugary growth medium and inoculated each with Escherichia coli bacteria. For the past 34 years, Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing and his colleagues … Read more
The crew of the privately funded Polaris program’s first mission are reaching new heights to prepare for their record-breaking SpaceX flight later this year. A mission profile, estimated launch schedule, and crew update were recently shared on the Polaris website, a dual effort between SpaceX and billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. Isaacman funded and commanded … Read more
NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover took this photo of a balancing rock and a snakehead rock on June 12, 2022, using its Mastcam-Z camera system. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) NASA’s Perseverance rover has traveled to strange and intriguing Martian terrain. On Sunday (June 12), the size of a car Perseverance took a photo that could be mistaken … Read more
Astronomers believe they have discovered the fastest growing black hole in the past 9 billion years. The supermassive black hole consumes the equivalent of an Earth every second and has the mass of 3 billion suns, they estimate. Scientists have discovered an extremely bright quasar, a luminous object powered by a supermassive black hole, using … Read more
In April, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, again fired their cosmic cannon, the Large Hadron Collider. After a three-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, the collider has resumed firing protons — the bare innards of hydrogen atoms — around its 17-mile underground electromagnetic racetrack. In early July, the … Read more
The first detection of what appears to be a rogue black hole drifting through the Milky Way, revealed earlier this year, has just received significant validation. A second team of scientists, conducting a separate and independent analysis, came to almost the same conclusion, adding weight to the idea that we have potentially identified a rogue … Read more
The Gaia Galaxy Mapping Mission has detected thousands of stellar earthquakes that could provide new insights into the inner workings of stars. The discovery is rather surprising because the spacecraft was not designed to do such work, Conny Aerts, an astronomer at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, told a Space Agency press conference. European … Read more
When in the deep, dark ocean, seals use their whiskers to stalk prey, a study has confirmed after observing the marine mammals in their natural habitat. Light struggles to penetrate the darkness of the ocean depths, and animals have found a variety of adaptations to live and hunt there. Whales and dolphins, for example, use … Read more
Ten years ago, particle physicists rocked the world. On July 4, 2012, 6,000 researchers working with the world’s largest atom destroyer, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced that they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle, key to their obscure explanation of how other fundamental particles … Read more