In 2019, LIGO and Virgo recorded something truly bizarre – a gravitational wave event less than a tenth of a second in duration. Compared to the drawn-out chirps of black hole binaries on decaying orbital spirals, it was a sharp crack. The best explanation of the event, named GW190521, was a chance encounter of two…
A tiny, reptilian fossil has been excavated from layers of ancient sandstone, where it was preserved for over 240 million years – predating the dinosaurs. The little lizard-like creature pinches the record for the oldest known lepidosaur. Until now, this title was held by Wirtembergia, which lived 3-7 million years later. Lepidosaurs are a group…
Dinosaur life wasn’t all peaches and cream before the Chicxulub asteroid struck Earth. Some were plagued by much smaller dangers long before. A new study has found evidence that a potentially deadly bone disease endangered the lives of numerous long-necked dinosaurs in what is now Brazil, roughly 80 million years ago. These are some of…
The insecticide chlorpyrifos is a powerful tool for controlling various pests, making it one of the most widely used pesticides during the latter half of the 20th century. Like many pesticides, however, chlorpyrifos lacks precision. In addition to harming non-target insects like bees, it has also been linked to health risks for much larger animals…
Humans living on the Iberian Peninsula during the late Neolithic period may have eaten their neighbors in one grim and grisly act of social violence, new evidence reveals. At least 11 individuals – including children and adolescents – appear to have been skinned, defleshed, disarticulated, fractured, cooked, and eaten by other people, according to the…
For years, NASA has monitored a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa. This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than…
Dopamine is one of the most extensively studied chemical messengers in the human brain, and yet scientists are still figuring out how it works to accomplish so much. For years, the classic view has been that, when released, dopamine slowly diffuses through the brain like a chemical megaphone, broadcasting information far and wide to numerous…
A survey of more than 1,000 American teen drivers has found they spend about 21 percent of each drive looking at their phones. This is despite the majority of states in the US banning all types of phone usage for young drivers. The research team, including scientists from Harvard University, began by interviewing 20 high…
The colossal black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning almost as fast as its maximum rotation rate. That’s just one thing astrophysicists have discovered after developing and applying a new method to tease apart the secrets still hidden in supermassive black hole observations collected by the Event Horizon Telescope…