Astronomers using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have looked for dust-extinguished supernovae in the nuclear regions of 40 luminous and ultra-luminous infrared galaxies within 200 Mpc (652 million light-years). This image shows galaxy Arp 148, captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope; specially processed Spitzer data is shown inside the white...
Known as Si.427, the ancient clay tablet was discovered and cataloged along with many other tablets by the 1894 French archaeological expedition at Sippar in central Iraq. Si.427, obverse. Image credit: İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri / D.F. Mansfield, doi: 10.1007/s10699-021-09806-0. “Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian period (1900-1600 BCE),” said Dr. Daniel Mansfield, a mathematician in the...
A team of paleontologists has digitally reconstructed the facial skeleton and brain endocast of Ichthyornis dispar, a toothed stem bird that lived in North America during the Late Cretaceous epoch and has traditionally been considered the nearest known well-understood relative of living birds. The ancestors of living birds had a brain shape much different from other dinosaurs (including other early...
Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul have observed several bird species exhibiting a behavior that the authors are terming kleptotrichy (from Greek ‘klepto-’ — to steal + ‘trich-’ — hair). A black-crested titmouse (Baeolophus atricristatus) stealing fur from a sleeping fox. Image credit: YouTube channel...
The new exotic particle discovered by physicists from the LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) contains two quarks and two antiquarks. Labeled Tcc+, it is the longest-lived exotic particle ever discovered and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. An artist’s impression of Tcc+, a tetraquark composed of two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark....
Baroreceptors — natural blood-pressure barometers inside our bodies — detect subtle changes in blood pressure and adjust hormone levels to keep it in check. Scientists have long suspected that these pressure sensors existed in specialized kidney cells called renin cells, but no one has been able to locate them until now. Watanabe et al. show that the enigmatic baroreceptor is a nuclear...
An analysis of the high-quality nuclear genomes previously published from three Neanderthals and one Denisovan shows that these extinct hominins were polymorphic for ABO blood groups and shared blood group alleles — different versions of the same gene — recurrent in modern sub-Saharan populations. Condemi et al. analyzed the blood types of Neanderthals and Denisovans by looking at their...
Reconstructing the emergence and weathering of Earth’s continental crust in the Archean eon is crucial for our understanding of early ocean chemistry, biosphere evolution and the onset of plate tectonics. An artistic conception of the early Earth. Image credit: Simone Marchi / NASA. Once land becomes established through dynamic processes like plate tectonics, it begins to weather and add crucial...
Known as Si.427, the ancient clay tablet was discovered and cataloged along with many other tablets by the 1894 French archaeological expedition at Sippar in central Iraq. Si.427, obverse. Image credit: İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri / D.F. Mansfield, doi: 10.1007/s10699-021-09806-0. “Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian period (1900-1600 BCE),” said Dr. Daniel Mansfield, a mathematician in the...