Nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking. The finding, published today, Aug. 13, in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, means that Greenland’sContinue Reading
This enormous predator had jaws powerful enough to subdue massive dinosaur prey. An enormous Cretaceous crocodile relative hunted dinosaurs, ripping them apart using powerful jaws lined with teeth “the size of bananas,” researchers say. Known as Deinosuchus, which means “terrible crocodile” in Greek, this lineage of semiaquatic reptiles certainly livedContinue Reading
The jury is still out. In recent years, the notion of an insect apocalypse has become a hot topic in the conservation science community and has captured the public’s attention. Scientists who warn that this catastrophe is unfolding assert that arthropods — a large category of invertebrates that includes insectsContinue Reading
Telescope observations of thousands of these stripped-down stars confirm the trend Telescope observations have confirmed a weird property of white dwarf stars: As they pack on more mass, they shrink in size. White dwarfs, the stripped cores of dead stars, are thought to have this counterintuitive quality because they containContinue 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
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