Astronomers have observed an explosion in space that is pushing back against and influencing the baby star which triggered the explosion in the first place. If explosions like this one are common around young stars, then the young stars and their planets are exposed to a harsher environment than previously thought. Stars and their associated…
University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered compelling evidence that a nearby white dwarf is in fact the remnant of two stars merging — a rare stellar discovery revealed through Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet observations of carbon in the star’s hot atmosphere. White dwarfs are the dense cores left behind when stars exhaust their fuel and…
Human eyes are complex and irreparable, yet they are structurally like those of the freshwater apple snail, which can completely regenerate its eyes. Alice Accorsi, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Davis, studies how these snails regrow their eyes — with the goal of eventually helping to restore vision…
A University of Queensland-led study has found Australian skinks have evolved molecular armor to stop snake venom from shutting down their muscles. Professor Bryan Fry from UQ’s School of the Environment said revealing exactly how skinks dodge death could inform biomedical approaches to treating snakebite in people. “What we saw in skinks was evolution at…
About 56 million years ago, when Earth experienced a dramatic rise in global temperatures, one meat-eating mammal responded in a surprising way: It started eating more bones. That’s the conclusion reached by a Rutgers-led team of researchers, whose recent study of fossil teeth from the extinct predator Dissacus praenuntius reveals how animals adapted to a…
White cockatoos seem to have a natural proclivity for dancing Andrew Angelov / Alamy The headbang, the side-to-side and the body roll are some of at least 30 dance moves used by captive cockatoos. Cockatoos have been grabbing limelight online ever since Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), became an internet dance sensation back in…
Dramatic CCTV video of fault slip during a recent large earthquake in Myanmar thrilled both scientists and casual observers when it was posted to YouTube. But it was on his fifth or sixth viewing, said geophysicist Jesse Kearse, that he spotted something even more exciting. When Kearse and his colleague Yoshihiro Kaneko at Kyoto University…
New research led by the University of Victoria (UVic) has illuminated a significant and previously unrecognized source of seismic hazard for the Yukon Territory of northwestern Canada. The Tintina fault is a major geologic fault approximately 1,000 km long that trends northwestward across the entire territory. It has slipped laterally a total of 450 km…
Lightning might not strike twice, but black holes apparently do. An international group of researchers led by Tel Aviv University astronomers observed a flare caused when a star falls onto a black hole and is destroyed. Surprisingly, this flare occurred about two years after a nearly identical flare named AT 2022dbl, from the exact same…
An international team of scientists have provided an unprecedented tally of elemental sulfur spread between the stars using data from the Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft. Astronomers used X-rays from two binary star systems to detect sulfur in the interstellar medium, the gas and dust found in the space between stars. It’s…
