A visualisation of the Radcliffe wave, a series of dust and gas clouds (marked here in red) across the Milky Way. It is about 400 light years from our sun, marked in yellow Alyssa A. Goodman/Harvard University Our solar system passed through a vast wave of gas and dust around 14 million years ago, dimming…
Prototaxites formed tall structures like tree trunks, shown in this illustration of a landscape from the Silurian Period RICHARD JONES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A bizarre ancient organism previously thought to be a giant fungus may actually belong to an undiscovered branch of the tree of life that mysteriously went extinct. Prototaxites, which lived between 420 million…
A Soyuz MS rocket at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Rhiannon Adam This ghostly image of a Soyuz MS rocket at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, shot the night before it took off for the International Space Station in December 2021, has a particularly poignant resonance for its photographer, Rhiannon Adam. Around a month earlier, she had…
The houndshark species Mustelus lenticulatus Paul Caiger At least one shark species has a bark to go along with its bite. It can make clicking noises, scientists report, a first among an animal group once thought to be totally silent. During her doctoral research at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Carolin Nieder, now…
Giraffes in the Tarangire ecosystem in Tanzania Monica Bond The beautiful mottled patterns of a giraffe’s coat work as more than camouflage – the size of the spots seems to be linked to how well the animals survive during unusual temperatures. Every giraffe has a unique array of spots. Patterns with larger and rounder spots…
Marshall (voiced by Dave King) finds the amazing Blue Angel mushroom Warner Bros. Discovery Common Side EffectsJoseph Bennett, Steve HelyChannel 4 (UK); Cartoon Network, Max (US) One of the best shows I watched last year was Scavengers Reign, a lushly animated sci-fi series about an interstellar cargo ship that crashes on a planet full of…
An image of the quasar 3C 186, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center A rare collision between two supermassive black holes (SMBH) appears to have sent the resulting merger speeding through the universe, making it one of the fastest-moving black holes we have ever seen. Astronomers have long puzzled over…
African forest elephants Will Burrard-Lucas Night has fallen; an elephant mother and her calf walk through Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, which covers more than 4000 square kilometres of rainforest in the northern Republic of the Congo. This remarkable photograph above of the critically endangered African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) was captured using a camera trap. The…
The Athena lander in low lunar orbit Intuitive Machines Intuitive Machines’s Athena lander has made it to the moon, but it seems to have fallen over. The lander is still working, but it isn’t yet clear which parts of its mission it will still be able to accomplish. The spacecraft launched on board a SpaceX…
A specimen of Sirenobethylus charybdis preserved in amber Qiong Wu An extraordinary extinct wasp found preserved in amber may have used its abdomen to grasp other insects like a Venus flytrap before laying its eggs on them. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s unlike any wasp or any other insect that is known…
