Space agency officials promise to deliver geology results from worlds dozens of light-years away The James Webb Space Telescope plans to explore strange, new rocky worlds in unprecedented detail. The telescope’s scientific consortium has an ambitious agenda to study geology on these small planets from “50 light-years away”, they saidContinue Reading
Serenading with like voices may help male wood frogs woo females into their pool Loud sounds matter in both car design and frog flirting. So New Hampshire biologists lugged an acoustic camera used by car designers to springtime frog-mating pools to explore female preferences. Now researchers suspect that a male’sContinue Reading
Local authorities suggest the young humpback did it on purpose. Watching a gigantic whale fly through the air as it breaches the ocean’s surface is one of the most beautiful sights in the natural world. But for the crew of one boat in Mexico, that experience quickly turned intoContinue Reading
Far-ultraviolet radiation from orange dwarfs could endanger planetary atmospheres If you’re an aspiring life-form, you might want to steer clear of planets around orange dwarf stars. Some astronomers have called these orange suns “Goldilocks stars”. They are dimmer and age more slowly than yellow sunlike stars, thus offering an orbitingContinue Reading
The unusual case marks the first time that rabies has been reported in this species of anteater. An anteater infected with rabies at a Tennessee zoo potentially exposed more than a dozen people to the deadly virus, according to a new report. The unusual case marks the first time thatContinue Reading
The discovery of these ‘missing’ dinosaur predators solves a food chain mystery. The top predator of the Jurassic and Cretaceous landscapes was usually a species of meat-eating dinosaur. These predators walked on two legs, had powerful jaws lined with sharp teeth and included species from groups known as tyrannosaurs, spinosaursContinue Reading
What scientists thought was a star orbiting a black hole turned out to be two stars instead As astronomy datasets grow larger, scientists are scouring them for black holes, hoping to better understand the exotic objects. But the drive to find more black holes is leading some astronomers astray. “YouContinue Reading
The portrait confirms that Charlemagne had a short neck. A rare 1,200-year-old silver coin featuring Charlemagne — one of the only known portraits made of the emperor during his lifetime — was recently rediscovered and promptly taken on a wild journey from a farm in France, to the bidding groundsContinue Reading
Great white sharks are anything but mindless killers. Great white sharks, (Carcharodon carcharias), also known as white sharks, are the largest predatory fish in the world. They belong to a partially “warm-blooded” family of sharks called Lamnidae, or mackerel sharks, that are able to maintain an internal body temperature that’sContinue Reading
A star in a galaxy that is now more than 27 billion light years away may allow us to understand the very first stars after the big bang A star more than 27 billion light years from Earth is the most distant individual one we have seen. Because light takesContinue Reading