NASA has released a beautiful new image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the ‘flocculent’ spiral galaxy NGC 5530. This Hubble image shows NGC 5530, a spiral galaxy some 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Lupus. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / D. Thilker. NGC 5530 is located approximately…
The Lambda-CDM (ΛCDM) model has been the foundation of modern cosmology for some time now, successfully describing large-scale structures in the Universe. It proposes that 95% of the cosmos is composed of dark matter (25%) and dark energy (70%). Dark energy, represented by the cosmological constant (Λ), is thought to drive the accelerating expansion of…
New results from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Collaboration have revealed signs of a time-varying dark energy. Two ‘fans’ corresponding to the two main areas DESI has observed, above and below the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Image credit: DESI Collaboration / DOE / KPNO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / R….
What constitutes a language has been of interest to diverse disciplines — from philosophy and linguistics to psychology, anthropology, and sociology. An empirical approach is to test whether the system in question recruits the brain system that processes natural languages. Despite their similarity to natural languages, math and programming languages recruit a distinct brain system….
University of Leicester paleontologists Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz have published a new book on how all the different kinds of so-called technofossils — such as plastic bottles, patios, mobile phones, old socks, ballpoint pens and a host of other things — will fossilize into the far future. Wind turbine blades, made from difficult to…
For the last two decades, the prevailing view in human evolutionary genetics has been that Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, and descended from a single lineage. However, according to new research from the University of Cambridge, modern humans are a result of two populations (potentially Homo heidelbergensis and…
Astrophysicists from China and Australia have found that the birth masses of neutron stars can be described by a unimodal distribution that smoothly turns on at 1.1 solar masses and peaks at 1.27 solar masses, before declining as a steep power law. An artist’s impression of a neutron star. Image credit: Sci.News. Neutron stars are…
Searching for land refugia becomes imperative for human survival during the hypothetical sixth mass extinction. Studying past comparable crises can offer insights, but there is no fossil evidence of diverse megafloral ecosystems surviving the most severe biotic crisis in the past 540 million years — the end-Permian mass extinction. In new research, paleontologists investigated plant…
Astrophysicists have found that a recently-discovered transient radio source, ILT J110160.52+552119.62, whose roughly minute-long pulses arrive with a periodicity of 125.5 min, is an red dwarf-white dwarf binary system with an orbital period that matches the period of the radio pulses, which are observed when the two stars are in conjunction. Artistic illustration showing the radio…
Paleontologists have studied and described three previously unknown dinosaur track-bearing surfaces from a locality near Biloela in Queensland, Australia. Dinosaur track-bearing surface from the Dunn Creek mining area of the Precipice Sandstone, Callide Basin, Queensland, Australia. Image credit: Romilio et al., doi: 10.1080/08912963.2025.2472153. Dr. Anthony Romilio, a researcher at the University of Queensland, and his…
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