There’s a deadly fungus spreading among snakes in the United States. But don’t cheer. As much as snakes might frighten us, they’re important players in the ecosystem, and we really don’t want to lose them. In 2006, scientists discovered some odd skin infections among snakes in declining populations in New Hampshire. Soon after, fungal infections […]
When visiting the center of a galaxy nicknamed J0230, pack a sturdy windproof jacket. There, you will encounter a galactic hurricane with winds whipping at about 200 million kilometers per hour. At that speed, nearly 20 percent of the speed of light, a trip around Earth would take just 0.7 seconds. These are the fastest […]
Joni Mitchell was right: We are stardust. Another one of the essential ingredients for life as we know it might have formed in space and then rained down on a young Earth, researchers suggest in the April 8 Science. The simple sugar ribose — a crucial piece of the molecular machinery inside cells — can […]
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) use their internal clock and the sun to guide them 4,000 kilometers south on their annual fall migration from eastern North America to central Mexico. Scientists have struggled to determine how butterfly brains combine visual cues from the sun with molecular timekeeping in their antennae to make the epic journey. A […]
An X-ray space telescope that went silent last month has been officially declared dead. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, announced April 28 that it has stopped trying to communicate with the orbiting observatory ASTRO-H (aka Hitomi) and will now focus on figuring out what went wrong. ASTRO-H launched on February 17 and seemed to be […]
Fossil discoveries in southern China point to an evolutionary crossroads around 34 million years ago that resulted in humans evolving in Africa rather than Asia, scientists say. A sharply cooler and drier climate at that time, combined with upheavals of landmasses that forged the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, destroyed many tropical forests in Asia. […]
Turns out, it is possible to be a lucky snakebite victim. Depending on the circumstances (and the snake’s mood, presumably), a timber rattlesnake may choose to strike its prey with only one fang and to pump out little or no venom when it does so. Far from being mindless, hair-triggered biting machines, timber rattlers don’t […]
SALT LAKE CITY— A literal moonshot just might reveal the thickness of Europa’s icy crust. A new plan to launch an SUV-sized rocket canister at Jupiter’s famous, frigid moon could shake the surface so much that the tremors would be visible from space, said mechanical engineer T.J. Campbell of the Catholic University of America in […]
SALT LAKE CITY — In the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka, pygmy blue whales are changing their tune — and they might be doing it on purpose. From 2002 to 2012, the frequency of one part of the whales’ calls steadily fell, marine bioacoustician Jennifer Miksis-Olds reported May 25 at a meeting […]
Jupiter has a new visitor. After traveling 2.8 billion kilometers across space, NASA’s Juno probe — a mission to investigate Jupiter’s deep interior (SN: 6/25/16, p. 16) — arrived at the giant planet July 4. Juno’s scientific instruments were switched off on June 29 before the probe slid into its first of 37 orbits, so […]