Science

They don’t produce anything like the torrent of “shooting stars” associated with August’s Perseids or December’s Geminids, but the Taurid meteor showers have something else going for them: fireballs. The Taurids are famous for occasionally producing exceptionally bright, slow-moving meteors that can dramatically streak across the night sky from September to December. As an added … Read more

A microscopic organism in a freshwater pond is governed by a different set of genetic rules. The newly identified protist, Oligohymenophorea sp. PL0344, which scientists stumbled upon while testing DNA sequencing technology, does something researchers haven’t seen before. It uses two genetic signals that normally tell cells to stop making proteins to insert two completely … Read more

A microscopic organism in a freshwater pond is governed by a different set of genetic rules. The newly identified protist, Oligohymenophorea sp. PL0344, which scientists stumbled upon while testing DNA sequencing technology, does something researchers haven’t seen before. It uses two genetic signals that normally tell cells to stop making proteins to insert two completely … Read more

Have you ever seen a black hole? The truth is likely to be “yes” and “no.” This is because we can never actually “see” a black hole, but rather we can observe the effects of the mind-blowing physics that occur around these incredible cosmological objects. Simply put, a black hole is an incredibly dense object … Read more

In 2009, a large, lone elephant named Alexander died along a road in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Over the next few months, researcher Dave Thompson watched what happened to the carcass and wondered how it was affecting the savanna. Now, research inspired by that thinking has found that elephant carcasses can continue to shape … Read more

NASA’s Hubble Telescope captures stunning images of the Trifid Nebula in deep space, nearly 5,000 light years from Earth. Astronomers are fascinated by new images captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope that appear to show a smiling face in our vast universe. NASA officials used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture a galaxy cluster in … Read more

Sign up to see the future today. Unmissable innovations from the cutting edge of science and technology. Beneath its craggy, pockmarked exterior, the Moon is believed to harbor a network of caves and tunnels from its volcanic past. Now, NASA has selected a mission to investigate a promising window into the underground secrets of our … Read more

A leopard-spotted rock that could prove whether life ever existed beyond Earth is sitting in a tube on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover grabbed up the sample, called Sapphire Canyon, from rocky outcrops on the edges of the Neretva Vallis, a valley sculpted by rivers that once flowed into an ancient lake in Jezero Crater more … Read more

A northern pygmy owl weighs about as much as a chicken egg. They are adorable, with big yellow eyes. They are also ruthless predators known for killing chickens much heavier than themselves. Don’t let her cute face fool you. These pint-sized predators stand approximately 6 to 7 inches tall, weigh between 2.1 and 2.5 ounces, … Read more

When Christopher Columbus made landfall in America on October 12, 1492, he encountered indigenous Lucayans living on the Bahamas island now called San Salvador. Columbus wrote in his diary about “great crowds of men” who greeted him that day, exchanged with him, and told him about other groups living on nearby islands. But within a … Read more