Science

A team of researchers discovered the skeletal remains of an extinct bird inside a slab of 99-million-year-old amber while working in Myanmar between 2015 and 2016. According to Xing Lida from China University of Geosciences, who is leading the research, the 9-centimeter-long specimen included most of the skull and neck, a partial wing and hindlimb, and soft tissue of the …

Scientists have uncovered 300,000-year-old fossil bones of Homo sapiens-the oldest reliably dated fossil evidence of our species. It makes the fossils about 100,000 years older than the remains of our species unearthed at Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, previously considered to be the oldest. Anthropologists have determined that that the Moroccan skulls, limb bones and teeth found in what once was …

The Red Planet can truly amaze people of the many mysteries it holds. Recently, a photo of a massive and deep hole on Mars has made scientists puzzled. A new image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows several shallow pits among carbon dioxide ice, nicknamed “Swiss cheese terrain” because it looks a bit like the famous cheese. But at …

Researchers have discovered an incredibly hot planet orbiting a blue star approximately 650 light-years from Earth. In May 2016, astronomers at the Winer Observatory in Arizona were observing the sky using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Teloscope (KELT), which allows them to look at many stars at once, at a low resolution. They noticed that a star named KELT-9 would dim …

A three-year survey of the California Current System along the West Coast of the United States found persistent, highly acidified water throughout this ecologically critical nearshore habitat, with “hotspots” of pH measurements as low as any oceanic surface waters in the world. The researchers say that conditions will continue to worsen because the atmospheric carbon dioxide primarily to blame for …

Researchers from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration have made a third detection of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space and time, first predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago. “We have further confirmation of the existence of stellar-mass black holes that are larger than 20 solar masses — these are objects we didn’t …

NASA will soon launch a pioneering mission to investigate rapidly spinning neutron stars which are defined as the “densest objects in the universe”. Nasa’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, will be flown to the ISS (International Space Station) aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Nasa’s NICER, while aboard the ISS, will conduct experiments to determine neutron stars’ measurements. NICER …

In the largest growth rate to date, the crack in the Larsen C Ice Shelf grew an astounding 17 kilometers (11 miles) between May 25 and May 31, 2017, leaving only 13 kilometers (eight miles) left before it breaks off. Until recently, the crack was running parallel to the edge of the ice shelf but it took a “significant” turn …

Researchers using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, have identified bright areas in craters near the moon’s south pole that are cold enough to have frost present on the surface. The new evidence comes from an analysis that combined surface temperatures with information about how much light is reflected off the moon’s surface. “We found that the coldest …

This creepy ‘faceless fish’ species was just discovered in the depths of the ocean. The CSIRO and Museums Victoria scientists discovered the 40cm-long fish, which appears to have no eyes, during a trawl 4000m below sea level in waters south of Sydney. Other creatures including bright red spiky rock crabs, spectacular bioluminescent sea stars, and gigantic sea spiders as big …

A study finds that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to ancient populations from the Middle East and Western Asia. A team led by Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, sequenced mitochondrial DNA sourced from 90 mummies originally interred in the ancient settlement of Abusir el-Meleq on the Nile floodplain. …