Talk about leaving a bad taste in the mouth. When scientists recently X-rayed a fish’s head, they found a gruesome stowaway: A “vampire” crustacean had devoured, then replaced, its host’s tongue. The buglike isopod, also called a tongue biter or tongue-eating louse, keeps sucking its blood meals from a fish’sContinue Reading
Talk about leaving a bad taste in the mouth. When scientists recently X-rayed a fish’s head, they found a gruesome stowaway: A “vampire” crustacean had devoured, then replaced, its host’s tongue. The buglike isopod, also called a tongue biter or tongue-eating louse, keeps sucking its blood meals from a fish’sContinue Reading
A less-lumpy cosmos could hint at cracks in physicists’ understanding of the cosmos The universe is surprisingly smooth. A new measurement reveals that the universe is less clumpy than predicted, physicists report in a series of papers posted July 30 at arXiv.org. The discrepancy could hint at something amiss withContinue Reading
What should you call that bird? You couldn’t go wrong with “dinosaur,” taxonomists say. If you saw a feathered, two-footed critter on the lawn, what would you tell people you saw? A robin? A blackbird? How about a dinosaur? From a taxonomist’s perspective, you couldn’t go wrong with dinosaur. AccordingContinue Reading
It takes a certain amount of heat to keep an ocean wet. For Jupiter’s largest moons, a new analysis suggests a surprising source for some of that heat: each other. Three of the gas giant’s four largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, are thought to harbor oceans of liquid waterContinue Reading
A new book looks at the Big Crunch, the Big Rip and more terrifying scenarios The universe is expanding at an accelerating clip, and that evolution, physicists expect, will lead the cosmos to a conclusion. Scientists don’t know quite what that end will look like, but they have plenty ofContinue Reading
Three spacecraft from three countries are now on their way to the Red Planet NASA’s Perseverance rover took off at 7:50 a.m. EDT on July 30 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and is now on its way to Mars with a suite of instruments designed to search for ancient life. TheContinue Reading
Stars in the Hyades are moving so fast it will disintegrate in 30 million years The closest cluster of stars to Earth is falling apart and will soon die, astronomers say. Using the Gaia spacecraft to measure velocities of stars in the Hyades cluster and those escaping from it, researchersContinue Reading
Our star’s birthplace might have been a tight, stellar cluster, researchers say The sun could come from a large, loose-knit clan or a small family that’s always fighting. New computer simulations of young stars suggest two pathways to forming the solar system. The sun could have formed in a calm,Continue Reading
Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars and The Sirens of Mars are apt reads during the pandemic Science writer Kate Greene couldn’t have known that her memoir about her time on a make-believe Mars mission would be published as millions of people on Earth isolated themselves in theirContinue Reading