Could Mars have once supported life? Scientists still don’t have proof. Yet some of the planet’s strange surface features might seem to hint at it. Earth scientist Dr. Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University set out to study the origin of mysterious gullies carved into Martian dunes. In her laboratory experiments, she discovered that blocks of…
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine report that they have identified how mammalian brains build intricate networks of tiny tubes that move toxins in and out of brain cells, much like pneumatic tubes send items through systems in factories and stores. Their experiments, which used genetically modified mice and advanced imaging tools, were supported by the…
On July 1, astronomers detected a strange, fast-moving object racing toward the Sun. Named 3I/ATLAS, this unusual traveler immediately stood out for one remarkable reason: its orbital path revealed that it had come from beyond our Solar System. This marked only the third time in history that scientists have identified an interstellar visitor entering our…
A minuscule parasitic worm capable of springing into the air up to 25 times its own body length can latch onto flying insects with the help of static electricity, according to new research. The findings, published in PNAS, focus on the nematode Steinernema carpocapsae and come from a collaboration between scientists at Emory University and…
A tropical flat-faced longhorn beetle in Malaysia Kim Hui Yu “It had a strange look, like an alien, but it wasn’t angry. It sat still on the branch all the time,” said Kim Hui Yu, who photographed the flat-faced longhorn beetle in the image above on a family trip to Gunung Jerai on Malaysia’s west coast. A lightbulb in a…
Illustration of the Triassic dinosaur Huayracursor jaguensis Jorge Blanco. High in the Argentinian Andes, a team of palaeontologists has found a small dinosaur fossil with the first hints of the extended neck that distinguishes sauropod dinosaurs like Diplodocus. Named Huayracursor jaguensis, the fossil is a partial skeleton from a dinosaur that lived in the Triassic…
Pulsars may be revealing that extremely low-frequency gravitational waves are moving through the universe. Observations reported in 2023 by international pulsar timing array collaborations could be caused by either a background of overlapping gravitational waves from countless distant sources or a single pair of nearby supermassive black holes orbiting each other. To determine which explanation…
What do you do when you encounter a strange astronomical event, a collection of data from planets thousands of light-years away, and models that can’t quite explain what you’re seeing? For one astronomer at Northern Arizona University’s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, the answer is simple: start building better models. With funding from the…
It rains on the Sun, and scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have finally uncovered the reason why. Unlike the water that falls from clouds on Earth, solar rain takes place in the Sun’s corona, the outermost layer made of intensely hot plasma. This phenomenon involves cooler, heavier blobs of plasma…
Nature follows countless rhythms: the changing of the seasons comes from Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and the steady tick of a clock arises from the back-and-forth swing of its pendulum. These patterns can be described with simple mathematical laws. Yet, order can also appear in a far more surprising way — on its own,…
