Category: Science/Nature

Some 280 million years ago, a large predator glided through the chilly waters of a supercontinent in the Southern Hemisphere. The eight-foot-long hunter had tiny limbs, an eel-like body and a flat head full of jutting fangs. And according to existing ideas about vertebrate evolution, it shouldn’t have existed. “It was displaced in time, displaced […]

On the lush, rolling savannas that link northern Tanzania to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, foraging elephants move back and forth on a sloping landscape in the shadow of snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro. The animals are accustomed to open-sided 4x4s full of tourists on the Kenyan side and seem to sense no danger from the visitors […]

One of North America’s largest areas of interconnected glaciers is melting twice as quickly as it did before 2010, a team of scientists said Tuesday, in what they called an “incredibly worrying” sign that land ice in many places could disappear even sooner than previously thought. The Juneau Ice Field, which sprawls across the Coast […]

A commercial Chinese rocket accidentally launched during a ground test on Sunday, climbing into the air before crashing into a nearby mountain and exploding in flames, the private company that owns the rocket said. Because of a “structural failure,” the Tianlong-3 rocket separated from its testing platform while its propulsion system was being tested and […]

A hunk of metal found on a remote trail in a luxury camping resort in North Carolina came from a SpaceX Dragon capsule, NASA said, confirming that the mystery object was yet another piece of space junk that has recently landed on Earth. The debris came from the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that had re-entered Earth’s […]

After two weeks of wildfires, a deluge in New Mexico caused severe flash flooding and debris flows near Ruidoso over the weekend. Dark floodwaters, blackened with soot and ash from the South Fork and Salt fires, rushed down mountain canyons and into town, turning Highway 70 into a river and pushing over a fuel tanker, […]

The Cube is also a good challenge for machine learning systems and robots. And Maria Mannone, an Italian theoretical physicist and composer, invented the “CubeHarmonic,” a musical instrument, developed with Japanese collaborators. “It is a Rubik’s Cube where, on each face, there are musical chords, a note on each facet,” she explained in an email. […]

These early studies “highlighted both the potential that we could learn from dogs, but also that we were going to need bigger sample sizes to do it really well,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute. And so, researchers began creating large citizen science projects, seeking DNA samples […]

This article is part of our Pets special section on scientists’ growing interest in our animal companions. Many students begin veterinary school with career aspirations that date back to childhood, when they fell in love with the idea of ministering to cats and dogs, or horses, or the exotic animals at the zoo. Jessie Sanders […]

A decommissioned Russian satellite fractured in space on Wednesday, creating a cloud of debris in low Earth orbit that prompted astronauts aboard the International Space Station to take protective measures. The satellite, which was orbiting about 220 miles above the ground, broke apart into more than 100 shards, according to an announcement on Thursday by […]