Only Natural
…Known as GJ 1132b, it is the closest rocky exoplanet to have ever been found… Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was so excited about the findings, published this week in Nature, that he described the new world as "arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system"… not likely to host life as we know it.…
Massive 'crack in the Earth' opens up suddenly in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains… The immense crack, which appears to split a hilltop in half, was discovered by startled backcountry hunters. …
…However, in a 2003 study the same team from the University of Illinois showed that the polyphosphate storage structure in bacteria was physically, chemically and functionally the same as an organelle called an acidocalcisome, which is found in many single-celled eukaryotes.
This meant that the acidocalcisomes arose before the bacterial and eukaryotic lineages of the tree of life split, making the organelle even more ancient than realised. …
…taken on October 14, 2015 and received on Earth October 15, 2015.…
A study showing that nearly all mammals take the same amount of time to urinate has been awarded one of the 2015 Ig Nobel prizes at Harvard University.
These spoof Nobels for "improbable research" are in their 25th year.…
a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg…the word "huh?" occurs in every human language.…
A major earthquake just offshore rattled Chileans, killing five people and shaking the Earth so strongly the tremor was felt in places across South America. …several coastal towns… saw flooding from small tsunami waves…
Meet Homo naledi, the newest member of the human family. Its physical traits are weird, its circumstances are unique and its age is totally unknown… engaged in surprisingly sophisticated behavior for its brain size…
…it really does look like a spoon hanging in the air, just above the surface of some layered rock. But as Mars is devoid of any civilization, advanced or otherwise, that is capable of manufacturing said spoon, there’s probably a more logical answer.…
A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. The series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth.…
Pappochelys is critical for understanding “a new stage in the evolution of the turtle body plan,” the researchers write. Prior to this discovery, a 220-million-year-old specimen from China, which displayed a partly formed shell and other turtle-like features, was the closest thing experts had to a seemingly sure-fire turtle relative. Other specimens, including a 260-million-year-old fossil from South Africa, were hypothesized to represent an even earlier turtle ancestor, but with such a large temporal gap separating them from the China specimen, researchers could not say for sure. Morphologically and chronologically, Pappochelys fits neatly between the two specimens, tying them together.…
Indicates Newport-Inglewood fault more important than previously thought
Risk in the next 30 years of 'big one' increased from about 4.7% to 7.0%
However, study says risk of smaller quakes has actually gone down
Scientists are moving closer to developing mind reading technology after researchers at the Wadsworth Center in New York were able to record the brain waves directly associated with speech during a recent study.…
A giant ring around Saturn is even larger than thought, spanning an area of space nearly 7,000 times larger than Saturn itself… “We knew it was the biggest ring, but know we find it’s even bigger than we thought, new and improved….”
…"We stumbled on these things completely by chance," says Susannah Maidment of Imperial College London, whose team was trying to study bone fossilisation by cutting out tiny fragments of fossils.
Instead, they found blood-like cells and collagen from 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossils – 10 million years before T. rex appeared.
Although the cells are unlikely to contain DNA, those extracted from better preserved fossils using the same technique may do so, she says. …
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has returned images from its final close approach to Saturn's oddball moon Hyperion, upholding the moon's reputation as one of the most bizarre objects in the solar system. The views show Hyperion's deeply impact-scarred surface, with many craters displaying dark material on their floors.…
Researchers say the key to making new friends is all in the mouth. Show your shiny whites, and friendships are easier to come by. The reason smiling is key to new and healthy relationships is that people are more attune to positive emotions when they’re forming new relationships.…
Scientists say they've discovered Washington state's first dinosaur fossil… 80 million-year-old bone fragment probably belonged to an older, smaller cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex. …Researchers have been examining the nearly 17-inch-long, 9-inch-wide fragment for about three years. They say it probably came from a 3-foot thigh bone.…
The moonfish, which are about the size of a manhole cover, is now considered the first-known warm-blooded fish, scientists report in the journal Science. Through some physiological tricks, the fish is able to keep its entire body — heart, brain, swimming muscles and viscera — warmer than the surrounding water.
Headline: Chicken Embryos With Dinosaur Snouts Created in Lab
Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is looking better and better as a potential abode for alien life.
Chemical reactions that free up energy that could potentially support a biosphere have occurred — and perhaps still are occurring — deep within Enceladus' salty subsurface ocean, a new study suggests.…
This animation shows a sequence of images taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on May 4, 2015, from a distance of 8,400 miles (13,600 kilometers), in its RC3 mapping orbit. …The mysterious bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres are better resolved in a new sequence of images taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on May 3 and 4, 2015.…
…Worried astronomers warned 1999 FN53, which is an eighth of the size of Mount Everest, will skim the Earth in TWO DAYS.
A collision would be nothing short of catastrophic triggering mass destruction, earthquakes and global extinction.
The monster is more than TEN TIMES bigger than other meteorites currently visible on NASA’s Near Earth Object radar.…
At least 42 people were killed Tuesday and 1,117 have been injured after a major earthquake struck Nepal, triggering landslides and toppling buildings less than three weeks after the Himalayan nation was ravaged by its worst quake in decades.
Tuesday's magnitude-7.3 earthquake was centered near the Chinese border between Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, and Mt. Everest. It was followed closely by at least five aftershocks measuring from magnitude-5.6 to magnitude-6.3. …
…Might it be possible to reconstruct what someone was saying from video of nearby objects alone? A team of MIT computer scientists have figured out how to do just that, turning a chip bag into a "visual microphone."…
Among newly discovered, 160-million-year-old, fossils in northeastern China is one of Yi qi (“Yi” meaning “wing” and “qi” meaning “strange”), a pigeon-sized dinosaur without feathered wings. Instead, Yi qi has a long bone extending from the wrist, which resembles the structure of bat wings. …completely new to dinosaurs, and only by comparing it to bats, flying squirrels and the like could the researchers, published in Nature, even guess as to its function.…
…planet Earth is in the process of forming one monumental supercontinent… [land masses imaged from 150M years ago to 175M years from now]
Fossil hunters in Chile have unearthed the remains of a bizarre Jurassic dinosaur that combined a curious mixture of features from different prehistoric animals. The evolutionary muddle of a beast grew to the size of a small horse and was the most abundant animal to be found 145 million years ago, in what is now the Aysén region of Patagonia. … one of the most remarkable dinosaur finds of the past 20 years, and promises to cause plenty of headaches for paleontologists hoping to place the animal in the dinosaur family tree. … “I don’t know how the evolution of dinosaurs produced this kind of animal, what kind of ecological pressures must have been at work…” a horny beak, flatter teeth for chomping plants, a small head and slender neck. “It’s a therapod that turned vegetarian….”
At least 876 people are known to have died in a powerful earthquake in Nepal, with many more feared trapped under rubble, officials say. The 7.8 magnitude quake struck an area between the capital, Kathmandu, and the city of Pokhara… Tremors were felt across the region, with further loss of life in India, Bangladesh, Tibet and on Mount Everest.…
A giant reservoir of magma and hot rock beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano has been found and imaged. The newly found reservoir lies 12-28 miles below the surface, and is four-and-a-half times larger than the shallower, hot melted rock zone that powers current Yellowstone geysers and caused the caldera's last eruption some 70,000 years ago.…
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