NASA has released a stunning image of the Perseus molecular cloud, a giant stellar nursery about 600 light-years away in the northern constellation of Perseus, captured by the agency’s Spitzer Space Telescope. This image, taken by Spitzer’s Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) instrument, shows the Perseus molecular cloud. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. Infrared radiation from warm dust generates...

On November 17, 2019, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter made a close flyby of Phobos, the larger and inner of the two natural satellites of Mars. The probe tracked Phobos as the tiny moon passed in front of the spacecraft’s High Resolution Stereo Camera, capturing Phobos’ motions and surface in detail. Phobos is an unusual satellite, orbiting closer to its planet than any other moon in the Solar...

An international team of researchers has pinpointed the first comprehensive age for the last known occurrence of the early hominin species Homo erectus. This is an artist’s reconstruction of Homo erectus. Image credit: Yale University. In the 1930s, a team of geologists and archaeologists from the Netherlands made a stunning discovery at Ngandong on the Solo River in central Java, Indonesia,...

Paleontologists have unearthed the extensive root system of 386-million-year-old (Devonian period) primitive trees in a sandstone quarry near Cairo, New York, the United States. A Devonian root system at the Cairo fossil forest site. Image credit: Stein et al, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.11.067. The Cairo fossil forest covered an area of at least 3,000 m2, and is one or two million years older than the...

A team of researchers has found a novel retinal structure in the eyes of New World flycatchers. Named the megamitochondria-small oil droplet complex (MMOD complex), this structure may allow these sit-and-wait birds to see their world in a different way from other animals, and help them find and track insect prey more easily. This light microscopy image of the Acadian flycatcher (Empidonax virescens)...

Professor Attila Krasznahorkay and his colleagues at ATOMKI (the Institute of Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary) recently published a paper that hints at the existence of a previously unknown subatomic particle dubbed X17. The team first reported finding traces of the particle in 2016, and they now report more traces in a different experiment. Anomalies in nuclear physics experiments may show...

According to a new study performed in zebrafish (Danio rerio), a high-fat meal can shut down the communication between the enteroendocrine cells — specialized sensory cells in the intestinal epithelium that sense and transduce nutrient information — and the rest of the body for a few hours. An enteroendocrine cell (green) lies within the epithelium (red) that lines the intestines of a...

An international team of researchers has successfully sequenced and analyzed the genome of the blue-petal water lily (Nymphaea colorata), a plant species that is valued for the aesthetically attractive blue color of petals. The findings, published in the journal Nature, provide insights into the early evolution of the flowering plants (angiosperms) on key innovations such as flower development and...

New research suggests that during the Late Cretaceous epoch to the Early Paleogene epoch (80-50 million years ago), much of the southwestern United States had elevations in excess of 3 km (10,000 feet) and looked more like the Tibetan plateau. This map shows locations of samples analyzed to estimate crustal thickness during the Laramide orogeny. Text in white boxes is the average crustal thickness...

Tiny iron particles fall from Earth’s molten outer core and pile on top of the planet’s solid inner core, according to new research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. The inner Earth: white and black layers represent a slurry layer containing iron crystals; the iron crystals form in the slurry layer of the outer core (white); these crystals ‘snow’ down to the inner...