It’s not easy being ringed. A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, shows the Cartwheel Galaxy still reeling from a run-in with a smaller galaxy 400 million years ago. The Cartwheel Galaxy, so called because of its bright inner ring and colorful outer ring, lies about 500 million light-years from […]

Sometimes a photo is literally a matter of life, death — and zombies. This haunting image, winner of the 2022 BMC Ecology and Evolution photography competition, certainly fits that description. It captures the fruiting bodies of a parasitic fungus, emerging from the lifeless body of an infected fly in the Peruvian rainforest. The fungus-infested fly […]

Mini-Neptunes and super-Earths may have a lot more in common than just being superlatives. Four gaseous exoplanets, each a bit smaller than Neptune, seem to be evolving into super-Earths, rocky worlds up to 1.5 times the width of our home planet. That’s because the intense radiation of their stars appears to be pushing away the […]

Scientists have mapped out the dark matter around some of the earliest, most distant galaxies yet. The 1.5 million galaxies appear as they were 12 billion years ago, or less than 2 billion years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies distort the cosmic microwave background — light emitted during an even earlier era of the […]

In the upper reaches of the Skykomish River in Washington state, a pioneering team of civil engineers is keeping things cool. Relocated beavers boosted water storage and lowered stream temperatures, indicating such schemes could be an effective tool to mitigate some of the effects of climate change. In just one year after their arrival, the […]

Two partial skeletons unearthed in northeastern China have dashed the record for the oldest avian relatives of today’s birds. The remains belonged to a species, Archaeornithura meemannae, that lived 130.7 million years ago — about 6 million years earlier than the previous record holders. Fossil hunters discovered bones of the hummingbird-sized creatures embedded in siltstone […]

Earth — a planet of oceans, rivers and rainforests — grew up in an interplanetary desert. When the solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago, shards of calcium- and aluminum-rich minerals stuck together, building ever-larger pebbles and boulders that smashed together and assembled the rocky planets, including Earth. But Earth’s signature ingredient was nowhere […]

Free-range planetsAstronomers are puzzling over some space oddities: planets that don’t orbit stars. In “Wandering worlds” (SN: 4/4/15, p. 22), Ashley Yeager explored how these lonely rogues may alter the definition of a planet. Tim Geho wanted to know more about how scientists locate homeless worlds. “Where does the light come from that allows rogue […]

I blame my love for science fiction mostly on my mother, although my older brother Nathaniel probably should also take some of the heat. Both were voracious readers, leaving piles of books around the house, most of them sci-fi, that I couldn’t avoid escaping into.Fans of science fiction will find a few items in this […]

Many of the world’s largest herbivores are threatened with extinction, scientists reported last week in Science Advances. Some of them, such as giraffes and zebras, are at risk because they are hunted for their meat. But elephants, which also make the threatened list, are prized not for their flesh but for their two large ivory […]