Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System’s edge. They discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X. The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, was announced…
Hurricane Florence is currently a powerful Category 4 hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean, threatening the Southeastern United States and the U.S. Mid-Atlantic states. The sixth named storm, third hurricane and the first major hurricane of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, Florence originated from a strong tropical wave that emerged off the west coast of Africa…
Blue diamonds—like the world-famous Hope Diamond at the National Museum of Natural History—formed up to four times deeper in the Earth’s mantle than most other diamonds, according to new work published on the cover of Nature. These so-called type IIb diamonds are tremendously valuable, making them hard to get access to for scientific research purposes, explained…
Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum, Brazil’s National Museum has been consumed by a massive fire destroying much of its 20 million archived artifacts – losses were too great to be calculated The museum, which is located in Rio de Janeiro, is a former a royal palace that was converted to a museum 200…
How and when did early humans start walking upright? For clues, researchers have been looking at feet—and, more specifically, at toes. Bipedalism was a critical step in human evolution, and one that affected so many subsequent evolutionary changes in our lineage, from social behavior to the development of material culture, says Sergio Almécija, a senior research…
The Alps are on the go: The mountain range drifts northwards an average of one-half millimeter every year and rises 1.8 millimeters. However, there are strong regional variances. In order to follow these movements, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have evaluated measurements made by more than 300 GPS antennas over a period…
There are a couple of key features that make a turtle a turtle: its shell, for one, but also its toothless beak. A newly-discovered fossil turtle that lived 228 million years ago is shedding light on how modern turtles developed these traits. It had a beak, but while its body was Frisbee-shaped, its wide ribs…
A new study could help explain the driving force behind the largest mass extinction in the history of earth, known as the End-Permian Extinction. The event, also known as the Great Dying, occurred around 250 million years ago when a massive volcanic eruption in what is today the Russian province of Siberia sent nearly 90…
A new study led by scientists from the University of Bristol has used a combination of genomic and fossil data to explain the history of life on Earth, from its origin to the present day. Palaeontologists have long sought to understand ancient life and the shared evolutionary history of life as a whole. However, the…
A quick look at the fossil record shows that no species lasts forever. On average, most species exist for around a million years, although some species persist for much longer. A new study published in Scientific Reports from paleontologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama shows that young species can take advantage of new opportunities…