Science

H. Mephisto (The Devil's Worm). (microscopic image, magnified 200 times) Credit: Prof. John Bracht, American University When scientists discovered a worm deep in an aquifer nearly one mile underground, they hailed it as the discovery of the deepest animal ever found. Now researchers at the American University reporting in Nature Communications have sequenced the genome of a unique animal called …

An international team of scientists discovered "meteorites" containing other biologically important sugars, according to a NASA press release on Tuesday. Asteroids – rocky near-Earth objects of the sun – are the parent bodies of most meteorites. And the theory suggests that chemical reactions within asteroids can create some of the essential elements for life. In a study published Monday in …

Enveloped in gas and dust from an exploding star, the neutron star plays a winning game of hide and seek. Cardiff University When a giant star burst into a supernova 32 years ago, it had to leave behind an incredibly dense core, known as a neutron star. But a giant explosion called Supernova 1987A throws gas and dust into space …

New research from a collaboration between the Argentine and the University of Alberta paleontologists add a new piece to the puzzle of the evolution of the snake. Credit: Raul Gomez An old snake cheek sheds light on the evolution of the modern snake skull: 100-million-foot snake legs give a critical look at how modern snake heads evolved. A new study …

In very rare cases, an exceptional fossil is found that provides an exceptional view of the evolution of a group of organisms. This time it's a beautifully preserved skull of an ancient snake with hind limbs, Najash rionegrina . Our study of this fossil has been published in the journal Science Advances . This and other new fossils help answer …

The study of a distant moon usually means moving around its uniquely inhospitable surface, but on icy ocean moons like Enceladus of Saturn, it may be better to find things below. This rig, which will soon be tested in Antarctica, may one day roll along the underside of an ice-crust thick in the ocean of a strange world. It is …

Clara Martinez-Vázquez, an astronomer at the Inter-American Observatory in Cerro Tololo in Coquimbo, Chile, tweets that the bright lights reflected by satellites interfere with a powerful camera used to monitor other galaxies. "Wow! I'm in shock! A huge amount of Starlink satellites went through the sky tonight [the observatory]," she said. "Our exposure to DECam was badly affected by 19 …

When you think of the moon, you may think of a rocky, crater-like bare surface with nothing to do but wander into your rover and collect rocks. While the moon on Earth is certainly the embodiment of the dead world, there are more than 200 moons in our solar system orbiting planets and asteroids. Fortunately for human scientists, the universe …

The Murchison Widefield Array Telescope gives us a fresh look at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker (ICRAR / Curtin) and the GLEAM Team If human eyes could see radio waves, space would look very different to us. A team of scientists used the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in Australia to help people live the wonders …

There is not much air on Mars – the atmospheric pressure there is less than one hundredth of what we breathe on Earth – but what is small there are puzzled planetary scientists. Oxygen, which represents about 0.13 percent of the Martian atmosphere, is the latest puzzled. In a paper published this month in the journal Geophysical Research: Planets, scientists …