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An international team of astronomers has found that the central black hole of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 4395 has a mass of about 10,000 solar masses — about 40 times lighter than previously thought. NGC 4395 is located in the constellation of Canes Venatici, approximately 14 million light-years away. Image credit: Mount Lemmon Observatory / CC BY-SA 4.0. “The question remains open for…

The South Pole-Aitken basin — the largest crater in the Solar System — is a gigantic impact structure on the far side of the Moon. Data from NASA’s lunar spacecraft point to the existence of a large excess of mass — about 2.18*1018 kg — in the lunar mantle under the basin. According to new research, this mass anomaly may contain metal from a massive asteroid that crashed…

An international team of scientists has unearthed a collection of 2.6-million-year-old systematically flaked stone tools at the site of Bokol Dora 1 (BD1) in the Ledi-Geraru area, Ethiopia. Previously, the oldest evidence for systematic stone tool production and use was 2.58 million to 2.55 million years ago. The team’s work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests…

A new species of two-legged iguanodontian dinosaur has been identified from fossils discovered three decades ago in an opal mine in Australia. A paper describing the new species was published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. An artist’s reconstruction of Fostoria dhimbangunmal. Image credit: James Kuether. The new herbivorous dinosaur, named Fostoria dhimbangunmal, roamed our…

A team of biologists from the Universities of Guelph and Toronto has discovered that a species of carnivorous plant called the northern pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) in Ontario’s Algonquin Park wetlands consume not just bugs but also young spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum). A northern pitcher plant with a trapped salamander. Image credit: M. Alex Smith. Pitcher plants (family Sarraceniaceae)…

Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment envisioned by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, is a paradox that applies the concept of superposition in quantum physics to objects encountered in everyday life. The idea is that a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be triggered if an atom of the radioactive substance decays. Quantum physics suggests…

In a new study, a team of researchers from Pharmavite LLC and Nutrition Impact LLC found that people who got fewer than seven hours of sleep per night on average consumed lower amounts of vitamins A, D, and B1, as well as magnesium, niacin, calcium, zinc and phosphorus. The scientists also found a greater number of nutrients were associated with poor sleep in women than in men. This number was reduced…

Sloths once roamed the Americas, ranging from cat-sized animals that lived in trees all the way up to giant ground sloths. The only species we know today, however, are the two- and three-fingered sloths. They seem remarkably similar, but new molecular (DNA and protein) studies estimate they last shared a common ancestor more than 30 million years ago. The authors unexpectedly discovered that the…

A 3,300-foot- (1 km) wide asteroid struck our planet 1.2 billion years ago, according to new research published in the Journal of the Geological Society. An artist’s depiction of an asteroid impact. Image credit: Don Davis / NASA. In 2008, a team of researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Aberdeen found evidence for the ancient meteorite strike near Ullapool, Scotland. The thickness and…

In a new study, a team of researchers from Pharmavite LLC and Nutrition Impact LLC found that people who got fewer than seven hours of sleep per night on average consumed lower amounts of vitamins A, D, and B1, as well as magnesium, niacin, calcium, zinc and phosphorus. The scientists also found a greater number of nutrients were associated with poor sleep in women than in men. This number was reduced…