Science

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When scientists discover new prehistoric species, the fossils alone fail to conjure the creature in the flesh. It’s impossible to summon the entirety ancient shark from a single tooth, or some weird old rodent from a fragment of a jaw. This is where paleoart comes in, with illustrations that help you imagine how such an animal might have looked in …

Paleontologists say they have discovered the 76-million-year-old footprints of a ceratopsian dinosaur-dominated herd in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. The discovery provides the first evidence of mixed-species herding behavior in dinosaurs, similar to how modern wildebeest and zebra travel together on the African plains. A herd of ceratopsians (Styracosaurus albertensis) accompanied by an ankylosaur (Euplocephalus tutus) walk through an …

In a stunning display, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) recently captured a lightning storm illuminating the skies above Singapore. The image, taken during the station’s orbit over Southeast Asia, shows intense bursts of light flickering through cloud cover in the region. What is it? The ISS sits in low Earth orbit, providing a unique vantage point for observing …

Spain has offered to spend up to €400 million ($471 million) to host the Thirty Meter Telescope, an enormous observatory project facing imminent cancellation due to U.S. budget constraints. If Spain strikes a deal, the TMT would be built on La Palma in the Canary Islands rather than on Mauna Kea, a mountain in Hawaii. In 2016, La Palma became …

Lightning has long terrified and fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike. For something so relatively common, the precise atmospheric events that give rise to a lightning strike have been shrouded in mystery, but new research is offering some tantalizing clues. A team of engineers and meteorologists believe they’ve cracked the curious case of how lightning forms in the cloudtops, and their …

As the aviation industry works to develop new air taxis and other electric aircraft made from innovative, lightweight materials, there’s a growing need to understand how those materials behave under impact. That’s why NASA is investigating potential air taxi materials and designs that could best protect passengers in the event of a crash. On June 26 at NASA’s Langley Research Center in …

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other telescopes have shown what appears to be a supermassive black hole forming right between two merging galaxies. There have been multiple hypotheses surrounding supermassive black hole formation, but these observations support the hypothesis that suggests these behemoths are the result of immense …

Atomic Vision Achieved: New Microscope Sees Light at 1-Nanometer Precision  SciTechDaily Source link

A tiny red star not far from Earth is turning out to be a heavyweight in the search for rocky worlds. Nestled just 35 light-years away in space, the star L 98-59 is home to a tight-knit pack of exoplanets, including one that now appears to orbit at just the right distance to harbor liquid water. Using data from NASA’s …