Corkscrewing through the cosmos, three distant galaxies collide in a stunning new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This cosmic crash is known as a triple galaxy merger, when three galaxies slowly draw each other nearer and tear each other apart with their competing gravitational forces. Mergers like these are common throughout the universe, … Read more
Stunning images snapped by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have given the very first visible light glimpse of Venus’ red-hot surface, revealing continents, plains and plateaus on the inhospitable volcanic world. Peering beneath the thick and toxic Venusian clouds with the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument, NASA scientists spotted a bevy of geological … Read more
Observations by a long-running Mars mission suggest that liquid water may have flowed on the Red Planet as little as 2 billion years ago, much later than scientists once thought. Scientists charted the presence of chloride salt deposits left behind by flowing water using years of data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has … Read more
Ancient trees, the venerable sentinels of forests, may preserve genetic diversity that helps woodlands thrive for thousands of years, a new study suggests. In a typical deciduous forest, the oldest of the old trees — many of which were standing during the First Crusade — can act almost like time-travelers, representing the forest as it … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: The evil eye is a human look believed to cause harm to someone or something. The supernatural harm may come in the … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: Ghosts are both everywhere and nowhere, stories would have us believe. Their existence is constantly being investigated, but highly doubted, yet despite … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: Dragons are among the most popular and enduring of the world’s mythological creatures, believed to have been real for centuries. Dragon tales … Read more
Centuries ago, mysterious sea serpents and mermaids were believed to be hidden in the world’s vast oceans. Merfolk (mermaids and mermen) are, of course, the marine version of half-human, half-animal legends that have captured human imagination for ages. One source, the “Arabian Nights,” described mermaids as having “moon faces and hair like a woman’s but … Read more
Genetic changes that crop up in an organism’s DNA may not be completely random, new research suggests. That would upend one of the key assumptions of the theory of evolution. Researchers studying the genetic mutations in a common roadside weed, thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), have discovered that the plant can shield the most “essential” genes … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: Earth is slap bang in the middle of a 1,000 light-year-wide bubble with a dense surface birthing thousands of baby stars. Researchers … Read more
