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Unprecedented Genomic Study Shines Light on Ancestry of Indigenous Australians

Depiction of the Jarijari (Nyeri Nyeri) people near Merbein engaged in recreational activities, including a type of Aboriginal football, by William Blandowski & Gustav Mützel, 1857.
Sep 22, 2016 by News Staff

The first comprehensive genomic study of Indigenous Australians has revealed that they are indeed the direct descendants of Australia’s earliest settlers and diverged from their Papuan neighbors about 37,000 years ago. The study also confirmed that all modern non-African populations are descended from a single wave of migrants, who left Africa approximately 72,000 years ago. Depiction of the Jarijari (Nyeri Nyeri) people near Merbein engaged in...

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image_4210f-Antikythera-Shipwreck

Underwater Archaeologists Find Ancient Human Skeleton in Antikythera Shipwreck

Sep 21, 2016 by News Staff

An international group of archaeologists led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports has discovered...

An artistic life reconstruction of Jeddaherdan aleadonta. Image credit: Jorge González.

Jeddaherdan aleadonta: New Fossil is Africa’s Oldest Iguanian Lizard

Sep 21, 2016 by Enrico de Lazaro

 A 90-million-year-old fossil discovered in Morocco is the oldest known iguanian lizard from Africa, which could help tell the story of lizard evolution...

This image shows the Lyman-alpha blob LAB-1. This picture is a composite of two different images taken with the FORS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope - a wider image showing the surrounding galaxies and a much deeper observation of the blob itself at the center made to detect its polarization. The intense Lyman-alpha ultraviolet radiation from LAB-1 appears green after it has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe during its long journey to Earth. These new observations show for the first time that the light from this object is polarized. This means that the giant ‘blob’ must be powered by galaxies embedded within the cloud. Image credit: M. Hayes / ESO.

Astronomers Unravel Mystery of Gigantic Lyman-Alpha Blobs

Sep 21, 2016 by News Staff

This image shows the Lyman-alpha blob LAB-1. This picture is a composite of two different images taken with the FORS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope...

Smoking leaves ‘footprint’ in DNA. Image credit: Pexels.

Study: Smoking Has Long-Lasting Impact on Human Genome

Sep 20, 2016 by News Staff

According to a new study published today in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, smoking leaves historical ‘footprint’ on the human genome...

The Montpellier snake (Malpolon monspessulanus), one of the snake species studied by the team. Image credit: Alexandre Roux / CC BY-SA 2.0.

New Research Sheds Light on Snake Vision

Sep 20, 2016 by News Staff

The first major study of visual pigment genes and lenses in snakes has found that the reptiles match their vision to their lifestyles. The Montpellier...

This Hubble image shows the barred spiral galaxy Messier 77; the streaks of red and blue in the image highlight pockets of star formation along the pinwheeling arms, with dark dust lanes stretching across the galaxy’s starry center; the galaxy belongs to a class of galaxies known as Seyfert galaxies, which have highly ionized gas surrounding an intensely active center. Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. van der Hoeven.

ALMA Finds Cosmic Fountain at Center of Messier 77

Sep 20, 2016 by News Staff

This Hubble image shows the barred spiral galaxy Messier 77; the streaks of red and blue in the image highlight pockets of star formation along the pinwheeling...

American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). Image credit: Gareth Rasberry / CC BY-SA 3.0.

American Alligator’s Lineage is More Ancient than Previously Thought

Sep 20, 2016 by News Staff

According to new research, American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) have remained virtually untouched by evolutionary change for at least 8 million...

8,000-year-old female figurine from Çatalhöyük, Central Anatolia, Turkey. Image credit: Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

8,000-Year-Old Female Figurine Found at Çatalhöyük

Sep 19, 2016 by Enrico de Lazaro

Archaeologists digging at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Anatolia, Turkey, have discovered an ancient female figurine, about 8,000 years...

This image captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 shows a dust-bathed cluster of fragments receding from the main nucleus of Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami at speeds in the range of 0.06 - 3.5 m/s. The nucleus of the comet is the bright object at lower left. This observation was made on January 27, 2016. Image credit: NASA / ESA / D. Jewitt, University of California at Los Angeles.

Hubble Images Reveal 332P/Ikeya-Murakami Disintegrating as It Approaches the Sun

Sep 19, 2016 by News Staff

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of the most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart. This image captured by Hubble’s Wide...

Damian Scarf et al. demonstrate that pigeons (Columba livia) trained to discriminate words from non-words picked up on the orthographic properties that define words and used this knowledge to identify words they had never seen before. Image credit: Damian Scarf / University of Otago.

Study: Pigeons Can Learn to Visually Recognize Words

Sep 18, 2016 by News Staff

Pigeons (Columba livia) can learn to distinguish real words from non-words by visually processing their letter combinations, according to a surprising...

This image was taken on April 25, 2016 from a distance of approximately 1.9 million miles (3 million km) from Saturn. The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft angle of 55 degrees. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.

Cassini Snaps Stunning New Images of Saturn

Sep 17, 2016 by News Staff

The latest images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft show the northern hemisphere of Solar System’s second-largest planet, as that part of the gas giant...

This image shows a pellet of plutonium-238 dioxide. The pellet is glowing red because of the heat generated by the radioactive decay (primarily alpha) of the fuel. Such pellets were used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators that powered NASA’s Galilleo and Cassini spacecraft on missions to Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. Image credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Plutonium Acts Like Ions in a Salt, New Study Shows

Sep 16, 2016 by News Staff

Plutonium, a heavy, silvery metal with 15 isotopes that is produced by the neutron irradiation of natural uranium, is formidably complex element that does...

Valleys younger than better-known ancient valley networks on Mars are evident on the landscape in the northern Arabia Terra region, particularly in the area mapped here with color-coded topographical information overlaid onto a photo mosaic. The area includes a basin informally named ‘Heart Lake’ at upper left. Data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter are coded here as white and purple for lower elevations, yellow for higher elevation. The elevation information is combined with a mosaic of images from NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, covering an area about 120 miles (about 190 km) wide. The mapped area is centered near 35.91 degrees north latitude, 1 degree east longitude on Mars. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU.

Mars Had Lakes, Snowmelt-Fed Streams More Recently than Thought

Sep 16, 2016 by News Staff

ESA’s Mars Express, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor have sent back new images and data from the Red Planet that indicate...

Model of Psittacosaurus sp. based on skin and pigmentation patterns on the specimen from the Senckenberg Museum, Germany. Image credit: Jakob Vinther et al.

Psittacosaurus Had Countershading Camouflage, Paleontologists Say

Sep 16, 2016 by News Staff

A University of Bristol-led international team of paleontologists has produced an accurate reconstruction of an exceptionally well-preserved specimen of...

Nesting area of Anthophora pueblo in Utah’s San Rafael Desert. Image credit: Michael Orr, Utah State University.

Anthophora pueblo: Newly-Discovered Species of Bee Excavates Sandstone Nests

Sep 15, 2016 by News Staff

A team of entomologists led by Utah State University researcher Dr. Michael Orr has described an unusual new species of bee from the deserts of the southwestern...

Captive Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis) using a stick tool to extract food from a wooden log. Image credit: Ken Bohn / San Diego Zoo Global.

Hawaiian Crows Show Talent for Tool Use

Sep 15, 2016 by News Staff

A team of scientists led by Dr. Christian Rutz, a researcher at the Centre for Biological Diversity at the University of St Andrews, UK, has discovered...

This image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows Markarian 1018, a galaxy located approximately 607 million light-years away. The faint loops of light around the galaxy are a result of its interaction and merger with another galaxy in the recent past. Image credit: CARS Survey / ESO.

Black Hole Duo Returns Active Galaxy Markarian 1018 to the Shadows

Sep 15, 2016 by News Staff

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Chandra and Hubble space telescopes have solved the mystery of a rare change in the behavior...

This impressive view of Charon was captured on July 14, 2015. Charon’s color palette is not as diverse as Pluto’s; most striking is the reddish north (top) polar region, informally named Mordor Macula. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

Researchers Discover Why Charon’s North Polar Cap is Red

Sep 15, 2016 by News Staff

Scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission have learned that reddish material in the north polar region of Pluto’s biggest moon, Charon, is chemically...

ESA Releases Gaia’s Billion-Star Map of Milky Way Galaxy

Sep 15, 2016 by News Staff

On its way to assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of our Galaxy, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft has pinned down the precise position on the sky and...

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