Shanghai held a series of commemorative activities on Sunday, August 13th, marking the 86th anniversary of the Battle of Songhu, also known as the Battle of Shanghai. These events aimed to honor the soldiers who fought and sacrificed their lives during the battle against Japanese invaders, while also providing an opportunity for more people to […]

A 305-million-year-old arachnid might shed some light on spider evolution. Researchers discovered the fossilized remains of Idmonarachne brasieri curled up in ironstone from central France. The legs, mouthparts and body of the 1-centimeter-long arachnid were all spiderlike. But the ancient arthropod was missing a key feature of all true spiders: silk-spinning organs. I. brasieri also […]

ATLANTA — Iceland’s “woman in blue,” the partial skeleton of a young woman found in 1938 in a grave with Viking-era objects, was a child of some of the island’s earliest settlers, researchers reported April 14 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Tooth development and wear suggest she was between […]

Meet the San Andreas Fault’s newfound neighbor. Mapping deformations deep underground along the shoreline of a Southern California lake called the Salton Sea, seismologists discovered a fault that runs parallel to San Andreas’ southern end. The newly identified fault, dubbed the Salton Trough Fault, shakes up assessments of the potential for damaging earthquakes in the […]

Deep beneath coral rubble in reefs off the coast of Guam, there lives a pale, black-eyed crab whose true taxonomic character has long been unknown. In 2001, amateur researcher Harry Conley discovered the translucent crab burrowing among reef rocks. Eventually, two specimens — each several millimeters long — came to the lab of biologist Peter […]

As the Cassini spacecraft plunges toward its death on Saturn, the world’s knowledge of the famous ringed planet continues to accumulate. Thanks to years of observations by the versatile probe, astronomers now know Saturn as intimately as macaroni knows cheese. But still hardly anyone outside the world of astronomy knows anything about Cassini — and […]

If Lewis Carroll were alive today, he wouldn’t bother with a looking glass. His book would be called Alice Through the Wormhole. Being the mathematician that he was, Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) would have kept current with the latest developments in quantum physics. He would no doubt be intrigued by a new paper describing an […]

The gravitational wave paparazzi have tracked down the cosmic neighborhood of two merging black holes. Scientists pinpointed the region in the sky where the two black holes violently melded and kicked up swirls of the spacetime ripples, locating their stomping grounds more precisely than ever before. Researchers from LIGO — the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave […]

Here are some of the things Kay Tye relishes: break dancing, rock-climbing, snowboarding, poker, raising her young daughter and son. These adrenaline-fueled activities all require basic skills. But true mastery — and the joy Tye finds in them — comes from improvisation. She boldly steps into a void, a realm where she has to riff, […]

The deep waters of the East Pacific hold an unprepossessing treasure trove: potato-sized lumps of rock that contain valuable metals such as manganese, cobalt and copper. Turns out, such “manganese nodules” are home to another kind of goody: a species of sponge never before seen, researchers report online September 24 in Systematics and Biodiversity. These […]