The radio lobes of Alcyoneus. (Oei et al., arXiv, 2022). Astronomers have just discovered an absolute beast of a galaxy Hiding some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching five megaparsecs into space. That is 16.3 million light-years long and represents the biggest recognized structure of galactic origin. The finding highlights our poor...
Credit: WOODRUFF ET AL. (2022); CORBIN RAINBOLT Peculiar growths on dinosaur neckbones hint at old infection It takes much force to cough a loogie up a nearly 4-meter-long neck, but that is what one dinosaur had to do. The Guardian reports that paleontologists have discovered unusual nodules on the neck of a 150-million-year-old sauropod, proof of the...
People like these Baka hunter-gatherers once ranged well beyond their current homeland in Central Africa. Credit: CYRIL RUOSO/MINDEN PICTURES Children's skeletons give genomes more than 3000 years old Central Africa is far too hot and humid for ancient DNA to survive-- or so scientists assumed. Currently, the bones of four children buried thousands of years earlier...
Credit: Ghedoghedo/Wikimedia Commons Pleistocene age worms found in Arctic permafrost live and eat well after being defrosted some 42,000 years later. Two ancient nematodes are moving and eating normally again for the very first time since the Pleistocene age. The roundworms were discovered frozen in the Siberian permafrost and subsequently thawed out and resuscitated in Petri...
Neuroterus valhalla is a newly described species of cynipid gall wasp discovered in the branches of a live oak tree near the Rice University graduate student pub Valhalla. Credit: Miles Zhang/Smithsonian NMNH Its name sounds legendary, but the newly uncovered insect Neuroterus (noo-ROH'- teh-rus) Valhalla does not look or act the part. It is barely...
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center NASA's Parker Solar Probe has taken its first visible-light pictures of the surface of Venus from space Surrounded in thick clouds, Venus' surface is usually hidden from view. However, in two current flybys of the Earth, Parker used its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, to image the whole nightside in wavelengths...
To study superconducting materials in their “normal,” non-superconducting state, scientists usually switch off superconductivity by exposing the material to a magnetic field (left). SLAC scientists discovered that turning off superconductivity with a flash of light (right), produces a normal state with very similar fundamental physics that is also unstable and demonstrates brief flashes of...
The image represents the 3D model of the polarization pattern in the ferroelectric PbTiO3 representing the cycloidal modulation of the vortex core. Credit: University of Warwick Ferromagnetic materials possess a self-generating magnetic field; ferroelectric materials create their own electrical field. Electric and magnetic fields are important. Physics tells us that they are entirely different classes...
A 3D illustration of fiber optic cables. Credit: Christoph Bergstedt / iStock We are in for an information revolution. Engineers in Japan demolished the world record for the fastest internet speed, reaching a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications...
When a pulse of current goes through a tube containing coal ash, a flash of light indicates rapid heating. Rare earth elements then become much easier to extract. Credit: BRANDON MARTIN/RICE UNIVERSITY As chemists struggle to discover methods to reclaim important metals from industrial waste and disposed electronics, one group has discovered an answer that...
