By combining gravitational lensing with the capabilities of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have detected two X-ray-emitting objects — two growing supermassive black holes or one such black hole and a jet — in an active galaxy called MG B2016+112. The X-rays detected by Chandra were emitted by MG B2016+112 when the Universe was only 2 billion years old. MG B2016+112:...
A team of planetary researchers from the University of Georgia and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has explored the relative age of large-scale troughs and impact basins on Vesta, the second largest asteroid in our Solar System. This image shows the asteroid Vesta. Image credit: NASA / JPL. Discovered by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers on March 29, 1807, Vesta is the only main-belt asteroid visible...
Around 400,000 years ago, pre-modern hominids — likely Neanderthals — at a Middle Pleistocene site in Italy appropriated elephant carcasses to produce an unprecedented array of bone tools — some crafted with sophisticated methods that wouldn’t become common for another 100,000 years, according to new research led by University of Colorado Boulder archaeologists. Tusks of straight-tusked...
An incomplete fossil record hampers reconstructing the early evolution of caimans (subfamily Caimaninae). In new research, paleontologists from Germany and the United States have described two previously unpublished, 52-million-year-old fossils of a key caiman species, Tsoabichi greenriverensis, from the early Eocene Green River Formation in Wyoming. Tsoabichi greenriverensis, cast of specimen in...
New research from the University of Tübingen demonstrates that nut-cracking can emerge in Sumatran (Pongo abelii) and Bornean (Pongo pygmaeus) orangutans through individual learning and certain types of non-copying social learning. Padana, a female orangutan at Leipzig Zoo, continued to use wooden hammers to crack nuts for some time after the end of the study. Image credit: Claudio Tennie. “Nut-cracking...
An international team of experimental physicists from the United States and Sweden has made the first direct observation of how hydrogen atoms in water molecules tug and push neighboring molecules when they are excited with laser light. Yang et al. made the first direct observation of atomic motion in liquid water molecules that have been excited with laser light. Image credit: Greg Stewart / SLAC...
Eating 30-60 grams (15% of energy) of walnuts every day for two years lowered levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or ‘bad’) cholesterol and reduced the number of total LDL particles in elderly individuals. Regular walnut consumption may be a useful part of a multicomponent dietary intervention or dietary pattern to lower atherogenic lipids and improve CVD risk. Image credit: Lubos Houska. “Frequent...
The bowfin (Amia calva) is a species of ray-finned fish native to North America. Also known as freshwater dogfish, grinnel, and mud pike, this species is an evolutionary enigma because it embodies a unique combination of ancestral and advanced fish features. In a new study, an international team of researchers led by Michigan State University has begun to unravel the enigma by sequencing the bowfin...
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...
The new mathematical formula can describe any bird’s egg existing in nature, says a team of scientists from the United Kingdom and Ukraine. The egg, as one of the most traditional food products, has long attracted the attention of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists from an analytical point of view. Image credit: Designer Coleman. Described as the most perfect thing, the egg has always been...