Astronomers at MIT have discovered thee extremely ancient stars in the Milky Way’s halo, a cloud of stars that envelopes the entire main Galactic disk. These objects formed between 12 and 13 billion years ago, the time when the very first galaxies were taking shape. The researchers label these stars as Small Accreted Stellar System (SASS) stars, as they believe each star once belonged to its own...

NASA’s Juno orbiter captured these views of the tiny, red moon Amalthea and its parent planet and during a close flyby on March 7, 2024. These views of Jupiter, captured by Juno during its 59th close flyby of the giant planet on March 7, 2024, provide a good look at Jupiter’s colorful belts and swirling storms, including the Great Red Spot. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald...

Archaeologists from Macquarie University and Polish Academy of Science’s Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Culture have discovered 16 new rock art sites in the Sudanese Eastern Desert or the ‘Atbai.’ Almost all of the newly-discovered artwork, which dates back 4,000 years, features the presence of cattle. Painted rock art at a site around Gebel Nahoganet in the Sudanese Eastern Desert....

A paper published earlier this month in the journal Cretaceous Research announces the discovery of a previously undocumented genus and species of medium-sized ornithopod dinosaur. An artist’s impression of Chakisaurus nekul. Image credit: Sci.News / UnexpectedDinoLesson / CC BY 4.0 Deed. The new dinosaur lived in what is now Patagonia, Argentina, during the Late Cretaceous epoch, between 100 and...

Scientists from the University of Nottingham and artists from Blast Theory have created Cat Royale, a multispecies world centered around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation. “From cleaning our homes, to mowing our lawns, to delivering shopping and couriering items around hospitals, robots are finding their place in...

With the world focusing on decarbonizing electricity and transportation, abating emissions from industrial process heat remain the elephant in the room. Using solar energy is an attractive alternative, but current solar converters show poor performance and high costs when process temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) are required. In a new work, scientists at ETH Zurich...

Spitting cobra venom is incredibly potent and causes dermonecrosis, which presents as rapid destruction of skin, muscle and bone around the site of the snakebite. This damage cannot be effectively prevented with current antivenom treatments, and patients are often left with life-changing wounds. In a new study, researchers from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and elsewhere used cellular and...

An international team of scientists has created the tree of life for almost 8,000 (about 60%) genera of flowering plants (angiosperms). This achievement sheds new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their rise to ecological dominance on Earth. Time-calibrated phylogenetic tree for angiosperms based on 353 nuclear genes; all 64 orders, all 416 families and 58% (7,923) of genera...

Recovering ancient records of Earth’s magnetic field is challenging because the magnetization in rocks is often reset by heating during tectonic burial over their long and complex geological histories. Geoscientists from MIT and elsewhere show that rocks from the Isua Supracrustal Belt in West Greenland have experienced three thermal events throughout their geological history. The first event was...

With the world focusing on decarbonizing electricity and transportation, abating emissions from industrial process heat remain the elephant in the room. Using solar energy is an attractive alternative, but current solar converters show poor performance and high costs when process temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) are required. In a new work, scientists at ETH Zurich...