This image of NASA’s Perseverance rover collecting data on the wear of the “Valhalla Glades” was taken June 14 in the “Bright Angel” area of Jezero Crater by one of the rover’s forward hazard avoidance cameras. The WATSON camera on the SHERLOC instrument is closest to the surface of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech After six months … Read more
Shocked quartz grains, with cracks filled with molten glass. Credit: UC Santa Barbara Researchers continue to build the case for the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. The idea holds that a fragmented comet slammed into Earth’s atmosphere 12,800 years ago, triggering widespread climate change that led to, among other things, an abrupt reversal of Earth’s warming … Read more
Inspired by LEGO, ESA scientists have used dust from a meteorite to 3D print LEGO-style ‘space bricks’ to test out building ideas for a future moon base. Credit: The LEGO Group ESA scientists have investigated how a future moon base could be built from materials on the moon’s surface. Inspired by building with LEGO, they … Read more
A special high-speed winch that the researchers used to quickly raise and lower instruments to track the movements of the dye underwater. Credit: San Nguyen. Credit: San Nguyen For the first time, researchers from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography led an international team that directly measured cold, deep water upwelling via turbulent mixing … Read more
Green and gold bell frogs in artificial hotspot shelter. Credit: Anthony Waddle Researchers from Macquarie University have used heat to develop a simple and effective way to help endangered frogs survive the devastating effects of a multi-species pandemic. In collaboration with the University of Melbourne, researchers have delved into the fungal disease chytridiomycosis, which has … Read more
Credit: AI-generated image A physicist who studies black holes has discovered that in an expanding universe, Einstein’s equations require that the rate of expansion of the universe at the event horizon of each black hole must be constant, and the same for all black holes. This in turn means that the only energy on the … Read more
A quarry illustrating bands of layered limestone from the ancient seabed in what is now Mercato San Severino in Italy. Credit: F. Tissot About 183 million years ago, volcanic activity in modern South Africa unleashed an estimated 20,500 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ocean-atmosphere system over a period of 300 to 500 thousand … Read more
Building compact behavioral programs. (A) Above: The space of strategies for solving a task can be wide, with many strategies yielding good performance. Bottom: Studying relationships between strategies can provide insight into behavioral variability between animals and tasks. (B) General task design: an animal makes inferences about hidden properties of the environment to guide actions. … Read more
S-BGLS periodograms of YV2 for the star HD48948, focused on three frequency ranges (7.3, 38 and 151 d). The absolute value of log P has no meaning; instead, the relative values of log P have meaning. The signal observed at approximately 42 d in the middle panel represents the unstable activity feature. Credit: Monthly notices … Read more
Reconstruction of Lokiceratops in the 78-million-year-old swamps of northern Montana, as two Probrachylophosaurus move by in the background. Credit: Fabrizio Lavezzi What have scientists done this week? Exactly four things, all of which are summarized below. ‘This sweet baby could hold 4.3 million suns’ Supermassive black holes: how do they get so big? This simple … Read more