Science

Last year, Pepper, a pet cat who roams the backyards of Gainesville, Florida, helped a scientist discover a new viral strain. Now, the furry feline is back at it again. In a new study, scientists have once again discovered an exotic virus infecting a dead rodent that had been caught by Pepper. This time around, Pepper’s furry hunting trophy helped …

Name: Roman dodecahedron What it is: A 12-sided bronze object Where it is from: Northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire You may like When it was made: Second to fourth centuries A.D. Related: Penguin Vessel: 1,600-year-old Nazca depiction of a cold-water Humboldt penguin that lives in tropical Peru What it tells us about the past: Roman dodecahedrons have baffled archaeologists …

Some intriguing new measurements of salinity in the oceans around Antarctica have set off reams of sensationalist speculations. Maybe some context is helpful… What we’ve been seeing The climate change situation in the Southern Oceans (those seas surrounding Antarctica and connected by the massive Antarctic Circumpolar current) have been anomalous for many years, decades even. While even the earliest climate …

QUICK FACTS Name: Kākāpō (Strigops habroptila), also known as the owl parrot Where it lives: Off the coast of New Zealand on the Codfish, Maud and Little Barrier Islands What it eats: Kākāpō are vegetarians. Their diet varies with the seasons and includes tubers, fruits, seeds, leaf buds, young plant shoots, fungi and moss. The first thing that you’ll notice …

Astronomers believe they’ve uncovered the source behind mysterious cosmic signals known as fast X-ray transients (FXTs) — and it adds a grim twist to our understanding of the death of stars. Right as a massive star explodes in a supernova, it unleashes a tremendously energetic stream of particles called a jet, producing a gamma ray burst — one of the most …

These Sharks Don’t Just Glow Blue – They Use Nanotech to Shift Color Underwater  SciTechDaily Blue Sharks May Be Secret Chameleons, Scientists Discover  ScienceAlert Scientists discover another animal that can change colour  The Independent “A Powerful Ability To Produce And Change Colour”: Turns Out Blue Sharks Don’t Always Look Blue  IFLScience “These Sharks Are Masters of Disguise”: Astonished Scientists Uncover Blue Shark’s Unique Ability …

A recent breakthrough in astronomy has illuminated the mysterious dynamics of a binary star system, HD 135344 AB, where a giant planet was discovered orbiting the primary star— a star that had previously been overlooked. This discovery, documented in a recent study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, reveals the fascinating ways in which planets form in binary systems. In the …

3 On Dec. 24, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe traveled closer to the Sun than any spacecraft had before. During this close approach, or perihelion, the spacecraft’s four instruments observed the Sun’s atmosphere from inside. This week, NASA released images collected by the spacecraft’s Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument. Since the close approach in late 2024, Parker Solar …

‘Zombie’ fungi that hijack insects are not just a modern forest horror story. A pair of tiny fossils locked in Burmese amber shows that these parasites stalked ants and flies nearly 100 million years ago in what is now Myanmar. The newly described fungi, Paleoophiocordyceps gerontoformicae and Paleoophiocordyceps ironomyiae, sprouted from their long‑dead hosts, just like today’s entomopathogenic relatives. This gruesome strategy …

A key method of forming planets finally has observational evidence, thanks to a network of radio telescopes in the U.K. that have resolved the existence of a huge abundance of centimeter-sized pebbles that will stick together and grow into planets around two young stars. “This is potentially enough to build planetary systems larger than our own solar system,” said Katie …