Some marine worms have developed a strange reproduction strategy: They essentially grow a second worm on their rear ends, head and all. This bizarre twin then breaks off and swims away to mate with other swimming butts of the opposite sex. In a study published Nov. 22 in Scientific Reports, researchers described exactly how Japanese … Read more
Galaxies like our Milky Way are mysteriously hard to come by in our cosmic backyard. New supercomputer simulations have helped astronomers finally answer why. The Milky Way sits within a galaxy cluster on the Supergalactic Plane — a billion light-year-wide sheet, or “supercluster,” upon which large galaxy clusters are pinned. But other spiral galaxies are … Read more
Name: Mexican salamander (Ambystoma mexicanum) also known as an axolotl Where it lives: Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco, near Mexico City What it eats: a variety of small invertebrates, along with some small fish Why it’s awesome: Despite its rarity, the axolotl’s incredibly cute looks has made it one of the world’s most famous amphibians, … Read more
In the forest, certain fungi attach to trees and fallen logs to break down and digest the carbon within their wood before releasing it as carbon dioxide. But when their preferred meal isn’t available, these wood-decaying fungi can chow down on plastic instead, according to a new study published July 26 in the journal PLOS … Read more
Devastating volcanic eruptions may have been so enormous they turned the planet into “Snowball Earth” 717 million years ago, a study has found. The volcanic outburst — one of the largest in Earth’s history — likely triggered a series of chemical reactions that sucked carbon dioxide (CO2) from Earth’s ancient atmosphere. The massive eruptions, which … Read more
Look up at the sky and clouds may look like “feather canyons” and “ice cream castles in the air,” as they did to Joni Mitchell. But why do they look as if they’re suspended in mid-air, and are they actually floating? And if so, what keeps them aloft? “It’s sort of an illusion,” Alex Lamers, … Read more
Astronomers have discovered a new class of stellar object that seems to be defying death in inexplicable ways. The object, located about 15,000 light-years from Earth, appears to be a magnetar — the collapsed heart of a once-giant star, now cramming a sun’s worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city, while … Read more
Nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and early 1960s left the first obvious and indelible marks of “overwhelming” human activity on Earth, and these events may signal the beginning of a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, geologists say. Fallout from these tests snowed down from the atmosphere and became trapped in the earth … Read more
A 64-year-old man got a medical checkup after his tongue began sprouting green “hairs.” The bizarre-looking fuzz turned out to be caused by a fairly common and harmless condition known as hairy tongue. The patient’s tongue had turned green about two weeks before he visited the clinic, shortly after he had completed a course of … Read more
Astronomers have peered back to the dawn of the cosmos to observe time ticking five times more slowly in the early universe than it does now — finally proving a prediction that Albert Einstein made more than a century ago. Researchers spotted the extreme slow-motion effect in data taken from bright cosmic beacons known as … Read more
