Illustration of Arboroharamiya fuscus, a newly discovered Jurassic mammal species with dark fur Chuang Zhao, Ruoshuang Li While many dinosaurs and pterosaurs flaunted flamboyant feathers, early mammals were a dull lot. A study of the fossilised fur of six mammals that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods has found they all had greyish-brown fur….
NASA/Adboe Stock/ Ryan Wills Our universe is expanding, so it must have been smaller in the past. Indeed, if we rewind our cosmological movie, we see the universe shrinking back almost to a point – the big bang – some 13.8 billion years ago. Is this when time began? Alas, things aren’t so simple. Albert…
Manganese nodules on the sea floor seem to be a source of oxygen – and may have been formed by bacteria Science History Images / Alamy Metallic nodules found deep in the sea seem to be producing significant amounts of oxygen by some unknown mechanism, researchers revealed last year. Now, we may have found out…
Sparks between water droplets may have started life as we know it Shutterstock/Perry Correll The first molecules necessary for life on Earth could have been created when tiny flickers of “microlightning” between drops of water sparked the necessary chemical reactions. “This is a new way to think about how the building blocks of life were…
Birds do it, chimps do it, even monarch butterflies do it – and by paying more attention to how animals self-medicate, we can find new treatments for ourselves Source link
An artist’s impression of what asteroid 2024 YR4 could look like as it approaches Earth in December 2032 NASA NASA has downgraded the risk of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth in 2032 to 1.5 per cent, or 1-in-67, down from a high of a 1-in-32 chance, which was the highest odds yet of collision. Astronomers…
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new cooling technology that could significantly improve the energy efficiency of data centers and high-powered electronics. The technology features a specially engineered fiber membrane that passively removes heat through evaporation. It offers a promising alternative to traditional cooling systems like fans, heat sinks and…
Many millions of years after the big bang, a point of light arose in a dark universe. This first star began to blast out radiation, which knocked electrons off the surrounding fog of hydrogen. More stars formed, turning nearly all the neutral hydrogen atoms, which had previously absorbed some wavelengths of light, into a fully…
New research led by Dr. James De Buizer at the SETI Institute and Dr. Wanggi Lim at IPAC at Caltech revealed surprising results about the rate at which high-mass stars form in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. The researchers based their study primarily on observations from NASA’s now-retired SOFIA airborne observatory, focusing on…
Budgerigars have exceptional vocal abilities imageBROKER.com / Alamy Budgerigars are some of the chattiest birds, and that is reflected in their brains. Budgie brains contain a map of vocal sounds, which is similar to that found in the human brain and has not been seen in any other bird. “We found that there was a…
