The tenuous nitrogen atmosphere of the dwarf planet Pluto is predicted to ultimately collapse and freeze over. Pluto is the smallest, coldest and most distant dwarf planet with an atmosphere in the Solar System. It orbits the Sun every 248 years, and its surface temperature is between minus 378 and minus 396 degrees Fahrenheit (minus […]

An international team of paleontologists has found the exceptionally preserved fossilized remains of an enigmatic new type of crab, Callichimaera perplexa, which lived approximately 95 million years ago (mid-Cretaceous period) in what are now Colombia and the United States. Callichimaera perplexa (means ‘perplexing beautiful chimera’) was about the size of a quarter and had large […]

A team of geneticists from the John Innes Centre and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has produced the first high-quality genomic sequence for the Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis), one of the 50 fundamental herbs used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The Chinese skullcap is a species of flowering plant in the mint family Lamiaceae found in […]

A team of researchers in the Netherlands has found that higher levels of body fat are associated with differences in the form and structure of the brain, including smaller volumes of gray matter. “We found that having higher levels of fat distributed over the body is associated with smaller volumes of important structures of the […]

Two new species of the bird genus Zosterops (white-eyes) have been discovered in the forests of the Wakatobi Archipelago, Sulawesi, Indonesia. White-eyes as a group have spread and speciated more rapidly than any other birds. They are adaptable, feeding on a wide variety of fruits, flowers and insects. These birds are also supreme island colonisers, […]