Paleontologists have unearthed the fossilized remains of a new and unusual therizinosaurid dinosaur with atypical hands in Mongolia. Life reconstruction of Duonychus tsogtbaatari. Image credit: Masato Hattori. Duonychus tsogtbaatari lived in what is now Mongolia during the Late Cretaceous epoch, between 95 and 90 million years ago. The new species belongs to Therizinosauria, a group…
Physicists with the KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment report the most precise measurement of the upper mass limit of the neutrino to date, establishing it as 0.45 electron volts (eV) — less than one-millionth the mass of an electron. Interior view of the KATRIN main spectrometer. Image credit: M. Zacher / KATRIN Collaboration. Neutrinos are…
A new study by University of California, San Diego computational astrophysicist Ethan Nadler shows that star formation can occur in halos down to 10 million solar masses through molecular hydrogen cooling. Nadler calculated the fraction of dark matter halos that exceeds a critical mass required for star formation. Image credit: Xiaodian Chen. Every galaxy is…
A team of biologists from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and France has developed a scenario of what life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, might look like if it does exist, where it is most likely to occur and how much of it might be present. An artist’s rendering of the surface of…
Deep soil — ranging from below 30 cm (12 inches) to hundreds of meters, depending on soil type and region — is a neglected ecosystem within Earth’s Critical Zone. Biologists have now discovered a widespread and relatively abundant bacterial phylum, named CSP1-3, in deep soils and evaluated its phylogeny, ecology, metabolism, and evolutionary history. A…
Astronomers using the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have detected supermassive black hole-driven winds in the barred spiral galaxy NGC 4945. This image shows NGC 4945, a spiral galaxy over 12 million light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus; NGC 4945’s supermassive black hole-driven wind is shown in red in the inset….
Paleontologists in China have unearthed a relatively complete skull and vertebrae that belonged to a previously unknown metriacanthosaurid theropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic period. Cranium of Yuanmouraptor jinshajiangensis. Image credit: Zou et al., doi: 10.7717/peerj.19218. Yuanmouraptor jinshajiangensis roamed our planet approximately 170 million years ago (Middle Jurassic). This dinosaur was a medium-sized member of…
Using advanced statistical modeling, a team of researchers from ETH Zurich, SETI Institute, the Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’ and the University of Belgrade explored how many exoplanets astronomers should observe and understand before declaring that life beyond Earth is either common or rare. Future telescopes will survey temperate, terrestrial exoplanets to estimate the frequency…
A diverse array of animals has evolved the ability to use tools (e.g., primates, parrots, octopus, crabs, and wasps), but the factors leading to tool use evolution are poorly understood. Fishes could provide insight into these factors via comparison of differences between tool-using and non-tool-using species. Anvil use is one example of tool use by…
Using Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 88-Inch Cyclotron, an international team of physicists has successfully made two atoms of livermorium (atomic symbol Lv) using a titanium beam for the first time, a breakthrough that enables the lab to try to make new element 120. To make livermorium, Gates et al. fused isotopes of titanium and plutonium….
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