A tiny, brightly coloured spider renowned for its funky courtship dances has seven more species than previously believed, a Melbourne researcher who was once terrified of the arachnids has discovered. Joseph Schubert has described the new species of peacock spider in a research paper published last week in leading international...
Using the unique capabilities of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by Virginia Tech's Nahum Arav has discovered the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe. The outflows emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space similar to tsunamis on Earth, wreaking havoc on the galaxies...
Scientists have found evidence of active microbial communities living in the oceanic crust hundreds of meters beneath the seafloor, proving that life can find a way under even the most extreme and remote conditions. Rock cores drilled from an undersea mountain in the Indian Ocean revealed that bacteria, fungi, and...
Chemical traces found in the shell of a marine bivalve suggest that Earth turned faster around its own axis some 65 million years ago than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365 daily full rotations. Rudists were large-sized bivalves, closely related to modern clams,...
Scientists have discovered footprints left by stegosaurus dinosaurs 170 million years ago on the Isle of Skye, the first evidence the iconic creatures once lived in Scotland. A team of palaeontologists from the University of Edinburgh found the line of grapefruit-sized prints after a storm in 2017 pushed aside boulders...
Using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), researchers have found more than 300 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), minor planets located in the far reaches of the solar system, including more than 100 new discoveries. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, the study also describes a new approach for...
In 2016, our colleague Xing Lida held up a small piece of polished, deeply yellow amber. As sunlight shone through the ancient resin, Lida saw the outline of a pristinely preserved, amazingly small skull. There was a prominent eye socket, a dome-shaped crown of the head, a long, tapering...
According to a new report, Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice six times faster than in the 1990s – currently on track with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case climate warming scenario. The findings, published in two separate papers in Nature, show that Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion...
Electrons spin. It's a fundamental part of their existence. Some spin "up" while others spin "down." Scientists have known this for about a century, thanks to quantum physics. They've also known that magnetic fields can affect the direction of an electron's quantum spin, flipping it from up to down and...
A star that pulses on just one side has been predicted in theory. But it took two simultaneous discoveries on opposite sides of our planet to uncover the first such example of a 'one-sided pulsator'. A star that pulsates on just one side has been discovered in the Milky Way...