All hail the wandering glider, a citizen of the globe, an insect for all of us.Whenever we see a dragonfly zipping through the airspace and devouring tiny insects with aplomb, we can appreciate they are so timelessly effective that they have barely needed to tweak their way of life in 200m years. Odonates are directly … Read more
Paleontologists have described a new genus of small, bird-like dinosaur that lived in what is now New Mexico approximately 73 million years ago. Life reconstruction of Dinevenator robustus. Image credit: Sergey Krasovskiy. The newly described genus, Dinevenator, belongs to a family of bird-like predatory dinosaurs called Troodontidae. The genus is monospecific, containing only one valid … Read more
Picture a golfer lining up a putt. Now stretch the green until the hole is 3,630 kilometres away and ask the golfer to sink it. That is the image NASA reaches for to explain how accurately Voyager 2 arrived at Neptune. The spacecraft had flown for about twelve years and covered 7,128,603,456 kilometres, and it … Read more
New evidence has come to light showing that the mysterious ‘little red dots’ discovered in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope could evolve into the active centers of fully formed galaxies.”Everything created in the early universe must evolve into something around us,” said George Rieke of the University of Arizona in a … Read more
Certain times of year you may notice the sun’s position in the sky around sunset makes driving in Austin trickier. On these evenings, it will shine directly down some streets, creating a light tunnel of blinding intensity.The effect is disorienting but also magical. When the light lines up perfectly with the street, it can almost … Read more
NASA just made an interstellar tweak to the Voyager 2 spacecraft, known as the “Big Bang”, to keep its remaining 50-year-old science instruments running a little longer.Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977, called Voyager 1, rely on a form of nuclear battery known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that uses the heat produced … Read more
A daring mission to rescue one of NASA’s crucial space observatories from falling to Earth has encountered issues of its own — but there may still be hope for both spacecraft to beat the odds. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has served as an astrophysics multitool in low-Earth orbit since it launched nearly 22 years … Read more
Canadians can prepare to witness the peak of a Perseid meteor shower and partial solar eclipse that is expected to light up skies across Canada next week. Cited by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) as “the best meteor shower of the year,” the peak viewing night is set to be Aug. 12 to 13.“You have … Read more
In the deep, dim ocean, a world of eat-or-be-eaten, lighting up may seem like a counterintuitive survival strategy.Nevertheless, it helps many animals hide from predators that might strike from below – a shine that conceals the shadow they cast against the faint light filtering down from above.Now, however, scientists have found evidence that one of … Read more
In counting geoneutrinos, physicists can get a direct measure of Earth’s vital heat-producing elements. “It’s the one thing we do that focuses on the Earth,” said Ryan Bayes, a particle astrophysicist at Queen’s University in Ontario who works on SNO+. “Everything else we do is more focused on what we receive from other places in … Read more