Officially named Kohoutek 4-55, this little-known planetary nebula lies within our Milky Way Galaxy. This Hubble image shows Kohoutek 4-55, a planetary nebula located 4,600 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / K. Noll. “Planetary nebulae are the spectacular final display at the end of a giant…
The quantum superposition principle allows us to prepare a system in a superposition of two arbitrary states. The paradigmatic example is the superposition of two coherent states. While the superposition of such states is typically called a Schrödinger cat state, in Erwin Schrödinger’s original thought experiment, the cat — a body-temperature and out-of-equilibrium system —…
The newly-discovered shape-recovering liquids defy long-held expectations derived from the laws of thermodynamics, according to a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This image shows emulsion droplets stabilized by silica nanoparticles with remaining nickel nanoparticles on the droplet surface. Image credit: Raykh et al., doi: 10.1038/s41567-025-02865-1. “Imagine your favorite Italian salad dressing,”…
Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (combination’s meaning is the sum of the meaning of its parts) or nontrivial (one element modifies the meaning of the other element). In new research, scientists studied the vocal behavior of wild bonobos (Pan…
A Martian dust devil can be seen consuming a smaller one in a series of images taken by a navigation camera aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover. Dust devils are formed by rising and rotating columns of warm air. Air near the planet’s surface becomes heated by contact with the warmer ground and rises through the denser,…
Apes and monkeys possess special anatomical structures in their throats called vocal membranes, which disappeared from humans through evolution to allow for more stable speech. However, the exact benefit these provide to non-human primates had previously been unclear. New research provides significant new insights into the diverse vocal sounds of non-human primates, and reveals for…
The destructive power of an impacting asteroid is primarily estimated by knowledge of its size. The near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 reached a peak 2032 impact probability with Earth of 3%, motivating a desire to determine its size. Owing to its infrared capabilities, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is uniquely suited for such assessment. Johns…
Light from an extremely distant spiral galaxy was bent and magnified by the gravity of a member of the galaxy cluster SMACSJ0028.2-7537 into a ring-like structure, called an Einstein ring. This composite image, which combines data from Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instruments,…
New research from the University of Bristol provides evidence that many mammals were already shifting toward a more ground-based lifestyle leading up to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Dryolestes, a Late Jurassic relative of Cretaceous therian mammals. Image credit: James Brown / Pamela Gill / University of…
Certain lichen species can withstand Mars-like conditions with an X-ray radiation dose of 50 Gy (Grays) that is expected on the Mars surface over one year of strong solar activity, according to new research from Jagiellonian University and the Space Research Centre at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Morphological and anatomical characteristics of Cetraria aculeata…
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