The tablet is the earliest discovered example of applied geometry. A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has revealed that the ancient Babylonians understood the Pythagorean theorem more than 1,000 years before the birth of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who is widely associated with the idea. The tablet, known as Si.427, was usedContinue Reading
Your fingerprints are different from those of everyone else on Earth. The whorls and ridges on your fingertips are determined partly by your genetic makeup. But if you had an identical twin with the same genetic makeup as you, would your fingerprints still be unique? Identical twins, also known asContinue Reading
Meet the sheepshead fish, a common Atlantic coast swimmer with a very crunchy diet. Last week (Aug 3), anglers at Jennette’s Pier in North Carolina pulled up something unexpected — and uncanny — from the Atlantic: a fish with human teeth. Yes, this fish — and its teeth — areContinue Reading
Satellite tracking of water vapor, critical for accurate forecasts, may be foiled by cellphone tower transmissions Federal agencies are competing with one another over radio waves used to help predict changes in the climate as the sky is increasingly cluttered with noise from billions of smartphones. On one side areContinue Reading
New simulations show one way the voids might lose their ‘hair’ Like a shaggy dog in springtime, some black holes have to shed. New computer simulations reveal how black holes might discard their magnetic fields. Unlike dogs with their varied fur coats, isolated black holes are mostly identical. They areContinue Reading
Four of the panels date as far back as 40 years before Thomas Becket’s grisly death. The stained-glass windows of England’s Canterbury Cathedral are so old that they “witnessed” one of medieval England’s most infamous murders, a new study reveals. The analysis shows that some of the cathedral’s stained-glass windows,Continue Reading
A new study is a take on the adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” When parasitic wasps come calling, some caterpillars have a surprising ally: a viral infection. Insects called parasitoid wasps lay their eggs inside young moth larvae, turning the caterpillars into unwitting, destined-to-die incubators forContinue Reading
A genetic analysis hints that the critters lack the right light-sensing proteins to see color Next time you’re looking at a rainbow, be thankful you’re not a tardigrade. While the microscopic creatures, also known as water bears, are master survivors when it comes to radiation, space or extreme temperatures (SN:Continue Reading
A new finding is some of the strongest evidence yet that planets around other stars have moons New telescope images may provide the first view of moons forming outside the solar system. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile glimpsed a dusty disk of potentially moon-forming material around a babyContinue Reading
The book grapples with the ethical dilemmas of saving Earth’s animals On the Arctic Ocean’s fringe, polar bears stand on ice thinning from human-caused climate change. Without thick ice from which to powerfully pounce on seals, many of these symbols of the wild north can’t eat. Should we feed polarContinue Reading