Nearby system may host habitable exoplanet Another potentially habitable planet has been detected in the nearby Alpha Centauri system, orbiting the sunlike Alpha Centauri A. The data suggesting the exoplanet’s habitability was collected using the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope via the Near Earths in the Alpha Cen Region project. Space.com Brain EEG may […]
What we can learn about black holes from water in a tank Researchers can observe many properties of black holes through water simulations, since gravitational interactions behave like fluid. University of Nottingham scientists describe in Physical Review Letters how they witnessed backreaction for the first time by creating a vortex of water and propelling waves […]
Range tightened for dark matter’s mass New calculations using quantum gravity have narrowed the possible range for the mass of dark matter particles, suggesting the mass can’t be very light nor very heavy. “This piece of research helps physicists in two ways: It focuses the search area for dark matter, and it will potentially also […]
What can we learn from 2 giant radio galaxies? The discovery of a pair of giant radio galaxies in a relatively small area has astronomers wondering if such massive galaxies are more common than previously thought. “We suspect that many more galaxies like these should exist, because of the way we think galaxies grow and […]
Arguments use more brain space Disagreements take up more real estate in the brain than agreements. After measuring brain activity in pairs of people either agreeing or disagreeing during discussions, researchers found that agreements activated sensory brain regions, while arguments activated cognitive regions, such as the frontal lobes. Yale Daily News Pack hunting amps up […]
Liquid glass, a new state of matter identified A state of matter called liquid glass has been observed behaving in a way physicists say they’ve never seen before. Liquid glass, something between colloid and a solid, is created by a pair of interacting liquid-to-solid transitions. ScienceAlert Mars’ wobbly rotation keeps poles on the move Mars’ […]
2020 has been all about Covid-19. Almost. Nature produced an excellent piece to review an extraordinary year: A review of 2020 through Nature’s editorials Quanta Magazine has produced a set of articles to remind us that science, in general, has not stopped: 2020 Biology: While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent […]
Levant may have experienced tsunami 10K years ago Archaeologists examining sediment cores have found clues that a massive tsunami may have once hit the coast of the Levant about 10,000 years ago. The clues consisted of seashells within sediment cores they are collecting along a beach in Israel, which was much farther inland at the […]
Ancient shipwreck offers clues about African elephants About 100 tusks found among the artifacts of a trading ship that sank in 1533 are giving researchers new insights into the African elephants that lived during that time, according to findings scheduled to be published in Current Biology. Conditions at the shipwreck site preserved DNA in the […]
Pterosaur ancestry may have an answer Pterosaurs have been linked to a group of ancient small reptiles called lagerpetids, according to an examination of a variety of fossils from several regions. Lagerpetids, which date back between 237 million and 210 million years ago, share similar traits with pterosaurs, including inner ear shape, longer hand bones […]