la palma eruption, lasers, new discoveries, volcanic eruptions, volcano

The True Origins of the World’s Smallest and Weirdest Whale

The pygmy right whale, Caperea marginata, is the weirdest whale you’ve probably never heard of. It is the smallest of the living baleen whales and is restricted to the Southern Hemisphere. Its tank-like skeleton is unique among whales, and its ecology and behavior remain virtually unknown. Even its mitochondria — the power plants of the ...

Troy Oakes

Skull of Caperea marginata.

Astronomers Are Puzzled by a ‘Planet That Shouldn’t Exist’

The search for planets outside our Solar System — exoplanets — is one of the most rapidly growing fields in astronomy. Over the past few decades, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been detected and astronomers now estimate that, on average, there is at least one planet per star in our galaxy. Many current research efforts ...

Troy Oakes

Illustration of two suns in a binary system merging.

Astronomers Have Found Life-Supporting Molecules Called Phosphates on Enceladus

The search for habitable conditions beyond Earth has just become more interesting with the discovery on Saturn’s moon Enceladus of biologically available phosphorus. Phosphorus is the most elusive of the six crucial elements needed for life. In research published in Nature, data from the Cassini spacecraft were used to find phosphorus compounds called phosphates in ...

Troy Oakes

Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Have We Got the Brain All Wrong?

The human brain is made up of around 86 billion neurons, linked by trillions of connections. For decades, scientists have believed that we need to map this intricate connectivity in detail to understand how the structured patterns of activity defining our thoughts, feelings, and behavior emerge. Our new study, published in Nature, challenges this view. ...

Troy Oakes

Brain scans.

Astronomers Detected 2 Major Targets With a Single Telescope

Astronomers have been working to better understand the galactic environments of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — intense, momentary bursts of energy occurring in mere milliseconds and with unknown cosmic origins. Now, a study of the slow-moving, star-forming gas in the same galaxy found to host an FRB has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. This ...

Troy Oakes

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope dishes are located in the Western Australian desert.

Supercomputers Have Revealed Giant ‘Pillars of Heat’ Funneling Diamonds Upward From Deep Within Earth

Most diamonds are formed deep inside Earth and brought close to the surface in small yet powerful volcanic eruptions of a kind of rock called “kimberlite.” Our supercomputer modeling, published in Nature Geoscience, shows these eruptions are fueled by giant “pillars of heat” rooted 2,900 kilometers below ground, just above our planet’s core. Understanding Earth’s ...

Troy Oakes

Rough diamond sitting among other rocks.