Using data gathered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and ESA’s Gaia satellite, a team of U.S. astronomers has identified 1,004 main-sequence stars that might host potentially habitable Earth-like planets — all within 100 parsecs (about 326 light-years) of Earth — and which should be able to detect Earth’s chemical traces of life. Kaltenegger & Pepper identified…

Stunning new images, taken by the SamCam imager onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on October 20, 2020, show the historic Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu. An artist concept of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Image credit: NASA / Goddard. The newly-released sequence was created using 82 images from OSIRIS-REx’s SamCam instrument, with 1.25 seconds…

Clovis is a prehistoric culture named for stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico in the early 1930s. New radiocarbon testing of bones and artifacts from 10 known Clovis sites show that this culture first appeared about 13,050 years ago and disappeared 300 years later at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, coincident with the extinction of the remaining North American megafauna and the appearance…

Yi qi and Ambopteryx longibrachium are two bizarre scansoriopterygid theropods that lived in what is now China about 160 million years ago (Late Jurassic epoch). They had skin stretched between elongate fingers that form a potential membranous wing. Most theropods were ground-loving carnivores, but Yi qi and Ambopteryx longibrachium were at home in the trees and lived on a diet of insects, seeds,…

A team of ornithologists from the United States, Colombia and Denmark has described six new cryptic species in the rufous antpitta (Grallaria rufula) complex from montane forests of South America. The Muisca antpitta (Grallaria rufula). Image credit: Nigel Voaden / CC BY-SA 2.0. The rufous antpitta complex is a group of passerine birds that includes three species — the Muisca antpitta (Grallaria…

In a paper published this month in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of physicists described a new mechanism of dark matter production. Baker et al. described a new mechanism of dark matter production: if dark matter particles acquire mass during a first order phase transition, it is energetically unfavorable for them to enter the expanding bubbles; instead, most of them…

Consuming a high-flavanol diet was associated with a significantly lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure and was inversely associated with blood lipids in a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports. Flavanols are a large group of flavonoids, which include catechin, epicatechin, epigallocatechin, epicatechin gallate and epigallocatechin gallate. They are found in teas, cocoa, fava…

An international team of scientists has sequenced and analyzed the entire nuclear genome of the scimitar-toothed cat Homotherium latidens. Their results demonstrate that this extinct species was highly divergent from all living cat species and did not undergo any detectable gene flow with living cat species after their initial diversification 14 million years ago. A pair of Homotherium latidens chasing…

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals a mechanism that may contribute to the formation of sharply pointed rock spires in striking landforms called stone forests. Stone forest in Yunnan province, China. Image credit: Zhang Yuan. Stone forests are pointed rock formations resembling trees that populate regions of China, Madagascar, and many other locations…

In a new study, published this week in the journal Science Advances, apes and monkeys were able to track relationships between sounds the same way as humans, showing that this ability predates the evolution of language itself by at least 40 million years. The ability to track syntactic relationships between words, particularly over distances, is a critical faculty underpinning human language, although…