Black holes capture everything they encounter. From subatomic particles to stars, solids, gases, liquids and even light, everything falls irretrievably in. And even more assuredly, black holes capture the popular imagination. Thinking about space, as humans have since they first gazed at the points of light decorating the nighttime sky, triggers the mind to imagine […]
A new peek at the genetics of beetle genitals reveals the underpinnings of a battle of the sexes. When mating, males of Japan’s flightless Carabus beetles insert a chitin-covered appendage that, once inside a female, pops out a plump sperm-delivery tube as well as a side projection called a copulatory piece. That piece doesn’t deliver […]
Divers monitoring coral reefs off St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January noticed something alarming: Big white lesions were eating into the colorful tissues of hundreds of stony corals. Some corals were dead by the next day — only their stark white skeletons remained. Others languished for up to two weeks. Within four […]
From the beginning, the moon has been humankind’s perpetual nighttime companion. Accompanied by innumerable points of light, the moon’s luminous disk hovered overhead like a dim substitute for the sun, just with a shape not so constant. Rather the moon waxed and waned, diminishing to a barely discernible sliver before disappearing and then gradually restoring […]
There once was a little bird, smaller than a sparrow, that lived about 99 million years ago. And it had a freakishly long toe. Researchers found the ancient bird’s right leg and foot preserved in a chunk of amber. Its third digit is 9.8 millimeters long, about 41 percent longer than its second-longest digit — […]
Carlos Jared discovered the first known venomous frog by accident. And it took him a long time to connect his pain with tree frogs that head-butted his hand. Jared, now at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, got his first hint of true venom when collecting yellow-skinned frogs (Corythomantis greeningi) among cacti and scrubby trees […]
Boa constrictors don’t so much suffocate prey as break their hearts. It turns out that the snakes kill like demon blood pressure cuffs, squeezing down circulation to its final stop. The notion that constrictors slay by preventing breathing turns out to be wrong. The snakes don’t need limbs, or even venom, to bring down an […]
Icicles made from pure water give scientists brain freeze. In nature, most icicles are made from water with a hint of salt. But lab-made icicles free from salt disobey a prominent theory of how icicles form, and it wasn’t clear why. Now, a study is helping to melt away the confusion. Natural icicles tend to […]
The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest known galaxy to abruptly stop forming stars. The galaxy, called GS-9209, quenched its star formation more than 12.5 billion years ago, researchers report January 26 at arXiv.org. That’s only a little more than a billion years after the Big Bang. Its existence reveals new details about […]
MIT chemist Admir Masic really hoped his experiment wouldn’t explode. Masic and his colleagues were trying to re-create an ancient Roman technique for making concrete, a mix of cement, gravel, sand and water. The researchers suspected that the key was a process called “hot mixing,” in which dry granules of calcium oxide, also called quicklime, […]