Wednesday, Mar 25th
Last update06:00:31 AM GMT
Science Glance
What could be the largest structure yet seen in the observable universe has emerged from data taken during a 12-year survey of the night sky.
The discovery is an apparent cluster of quasars some 4 billion light-years across. If it holds up to further scrutiny, it could challenge a long-held assumption that at the cosmos's largest scales, the physical processes at work and the distribution of matter and energy are the same, regardless of an observer's location.
For decades, scientists have assumed the central portion of California's San Andreas fault acts as a barrier that prevents a big quake in the southern part of the state from spreading to the north, and vice versa. As a result, a mega-quake that could be felt from San Diego to San Francisco was widely considered impossible.
But that key fault segment might not serve as a barrier in all cases, researchers wrote Wednesday in the online edition of the journal Nature.
The awe-inspiring Grand Canyon was probably carved about 70 million years ago, much earlier than thought, a provocative new study suggests - so early that dinosaurs might have roamed near this natural wonder.
Using a new dating tool, a team of scientists came up with a different age for the gorge's western section, challenging conventional wisdom that much of the canyon was scoured by the mighty Colorado River in the last 5 million to 6 million years.
In a world without sunlight, microbes still seem to thrive in an Antarctic lake iced over for at least 2,800 years, biologists report.
Lake Vida, a chilly brine pool covered by more than 50 feet of ice, resides in East Antarctica. Biologists led by Alison Murray of the Desert Research Institute in Reno report that 2005 and 2010 core samples reveal aquatic microbes thrive in its yellowish waters, in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
There’s an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighborhood.
It’s a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it’s out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. (In astronomical terms, that’s close.)
Astronomers have spied lonely planets before. But this newest object, seen near the southern constellation Dorado, is the closest to Earth yet found.
Brazil says it will try cloning eight animal species that are under pressure, keeping them in captivity as a reserve in case wild populations collapse.
Brazil's agricultural research agency, Embrapa, working with the Brasilia Zoological Garden, has collected around 420 tissue samples, mostly from carcasses, to prepare for a cloning program, NewScientist.com reported.
The date when stone-age humans first invented the lethal technology of spears and arrows has been set back many thousands of years with the discovery of small stone blades dating to 71,000 years ago.
Archaeologists believe the “bladelets” were used as the sharp tips for arrows or spears and were made by a relatively sophisticated technique involving the heat treatment of stone before shaping the final cutting edges.
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