Science

In a remarkable discovery on the cliffs of Durlston Bay near Swanage, Dorset, a new species of prehistoric mammal has been unearthed, offering fresh insights into the diversity of early mammals that coexisted with dinosaurs. The fossilized remains, dating back approximately 145 million years to the Berriasian age of the Cretaceous period, were found by Benjamin Weston, an undergraduate paleontology …

Daniel Kleppner, Physicist Who Brought Precision to GPS, Dies at 92  The New York Times Source link

A shark warning sign at the entrance to Coast Guard Beach on Cape Cod.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff “There are more white sharks off the coast of Massachusetts, and specifically off the coast of Cape Cod, than there were twenty years ago,” Greg Skomal, a senior fisheries biologist with the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries and a leading expert on white sharks, …

A discarded can tab, locked inside a new type of rock on England’s Cumbrian coast, tells a startling story about what happens when industry and nature collide. Geologists have confirmed that steel slag from old furnaces has fused into solid rock in only 35 years, overturning information from textbooks that marks rock formation in spans of geologic ages. How waste becomes …

Niagara Falls pulls in tourists by the boatload. Angel Falls towers higher than city skyscrapers. Yet both pale in comparison to Earth’s largest waterfall – an enormous, rushing torrent concealed below Arctic waves. The Denmark Strait cataract drops in slow motion beneath the chilly surface between Iceland and Greenland. The chute begins thousands of feet down, rolls over …

A scientist’s cat shot to fame last year for his role in the discovery of the United States’ first-known jeilongvirus. Now, the feline has replicated his success by fetching yet another animal containing a never-before-seen bug. The newfound virus was found in a dead Everglades short-tailed shrew (Blarina peninsulae), which Pepper the cat brought home following a successful hunting trip …

Duke, also known as @zadrigman on Instagram, isn’t your average dog rescuer. The experienced animal advocate regularly responds to emergency calls around his home in Mexico, but he doesn’t show up in just any outfit. He wears something much more fun. “I wear a superhero costume,” Duke said in a video for The Dodo. “Because I want to inspire younger …

In late 2022, NASA celebrated its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) as a massive success, a proof of concept for saving humanity in case a similar space rock were to ever head straight for Earth. The small spacecraft smashed into asteroid Didymos’ moonlet Dimorphos at a violent 14,000 mph, knocking it severely off course. But three years later, astronomers found …

Lockheed Martin has announced the details of a proposal to take over NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, tasked with retrieving the samples that the Perseverance rover on the red planet has already collected. These samples have great scientific value, including the possibility of the evidence of life. While originally conceived as an in-house …

Antarctica’s waters are getting saltier and driving a collapse in its sea ice — and scientists aren’t sure why. Antarctic sea ice has been declining since 2015, defying model predictions to hit a record 0.6 million square miles (1.55 million square kilometres) below its expected average extent in 2023. At winter’s peak in July of that year, the region was …