Sixty million years of climate change triggered the meteoric rise of reptiles around 250 million years ago, not a mass extinction of mammals as previously thought,said a new study. Just over 250 million years ago, during the end of the Permian period, and start of the Triassic, reptiles’ rates of evolution and diversity started exploding, leading to a dizzying variety ...

The oldest strain of Yersinia pestis–the bacteria behind the plague that caused the Black Death, which may have killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the 1300s–has been found in the remains of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer. A genetic analysis published on June 29 in the journal Cell Reports reveals that this ancient strain was likely less contagious and not as ...

Like a Swiss Army knife, NASA’s Lightweight Surface Manipulation System (LSMS) technology is likely to find many ways of usage on the surface of Moon as part of its Artemis moon program. This lightweight robotic crane with a structurally efficient truss frame and cable actuation mimics the movement of a human arm, but with a much longer reach as seen in ...

A 1,300-year-old Hindu temple of Vishnu has been discovered by Pakistani and Italian archaeological team at a mountain in northwest Pakistan’s Swat district. The temple was unearthed during an excavation at Barikot Ghundai. Built 1,300 years ago during the Hindu Shahi period, the temple site has traces of cantonment and watchtowers, said Fazle Khaliq of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Department of Archaeology. ...

A ‘rogue editor network’ infiltrated a research journal’s peer-review system in an attempt to publish sub-standard papers in an attempt to subvert the scietific research standards. The hijackers created fake e-mail accounts and web domains to impersonate respected academics, and managed to accept 19 papers for publication at The Journal of Nanoparticle Research. However, the suspicious activity was flagged by journal ...

The mystery of how the Galápagos Islands, a rocky, volcanic outcrop, with only modest rainfall and vegetation, is able to sustain its unique wildlife habitats has been resolved. The Galápagos archipelago, rising from the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean some 900 km off the South American mainland, is an iconic and globally significant biological hotspot. The islands are renowned for their ...

Erstwhile waste rock from abandoned and closed mines in the eastern Adirondack Mountains, New York, may prove valuable source for rare earth elements, said a newly published research after USGS found it following two of its recent surveys. Rare earth elements are critical for advanced technologies such as cell phones, supermagnets, computers, medical apparatus, renewable energies and advanced defense systems, ...

As astronomers are looking for a hypothetical “Planet Nine” in our solar system, an exoplanet 336 light years from Earth is looking more like the Planet Nine of its star system. Planet Nine, potentially 10 times the size of Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun, was proposed in 2012 to explain perturbations ...

Elon Musk-run SpaceX on Wednesday, November 25, 2020, launched another successful mission carrying 60 more Starlink satellites on its Falcon 9 rocket into low-Earth orbit that will join the rest in beaming affordable Internet. The reusable Falcon 9 rocket, which made a record-breaking seventh trip this time, was SpaceX’s 16th Starlink mission and the company has to date launched nearly 1,000 ...

Scientists are upset that one of astronomy’s most renowned telescopes — the 305-metre-wide radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico — is closing permanently, as engineers gave up on its repair after two cables supporting the megastructure broke catastrophically, one in August and another in early November. Featured in many movies such as Contact (1997), which was based on a novel by ...

India carried out final user trial of 3rd generation Anti Tank Guided Missile (ATGM) NAG on Thursday, 22 Oct 2020 at 0645 hrs from Pokhran range. The missile was integrated with the actual warhead and a tank target was kept at designated range. This was launched from NAG Missile Carrier NAMICA. The missile hit the target accurately defeating the armour. ...

India has unveiled the Draft Space Based Communication Policy 2020 (Spacecom Policy-2020) with draft Norms, Guidelines and Procedures for implementation of Spacecom NGP-2020. Under the policy guidelines, Indian private sector players wanting to provide communication service inside and outside India using a space-based asset are liable for damages caused to other space objects in outer space and its environment. Releasing ...

This (above) latest image of Jupiter was captured by Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth, giving clues on updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere. A remarkable new storm is brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot is changing colour again. The tiny new image is ...

NASA has taken it seriously as this unique phenomenon will finally result in weakening the earth’s magnetic field and eventually affects the protective field that shields us from solar flares, and disrupts satellite communication. Already, over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean, this unusually weak spot in the field – called the South Atlantic Anomaly, or SAA – allows ...

Roughly 76 million years ago, a Centrosaurus that lived in what is now Canada was walking around with a malignant tumour in its lower leg, found scientists based on its deformed fossil bone. The cancer was diagnosed osteosarcoma and this is the first time that cancer has been confirmed in a dinosaur, although scientists have identified benign tumours in Tyrannosaurus ...

US private space agency SpaceX is targeting Friday, August 7 at 1:12 a.m. EDT, 5:12 UTC, for launch of its tenth Starlink mission which will include 57 Starlink satellites and 2 satellites from BlackSky, a Spaceflight customer. The standard vehicle Falcon 9 will lift off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In case you miss ...

A team of researchers from Japan have brought some sediment samples from the seafloor to study the past climate. Small life forms such as microbes trapped in the sediments too were revived too given the right food and right lab conditions and to the surprise of the researchers, they are hungry and ready to multiply aven after remaining dormant for ...

A diminutive bird-like skull, exquisitely preserved in amber for almost 100 million years, did not belong to the smallest dinosaur ever discovered. It was probably a lizard. The skull was believed to offer a whole new lineage of birds, but the paper was retracted on Monday. The story on tiny dinosaur, its skull measuring only 7.1mm long, smaller than the bee ...

A massive haul of stone tools discovered in a cave in Mexico provide evidence that people occupied the area more than 30,000 years ago, suggesting that humans arrived in North America at least 15,000 years earlier than had been previously thought. The discovery is backed up by a separate statistical analysis incorporating data from sites in North America and Siberia. ...

Blue holes, or underwater sinkholes similar to sink holes on land, are scattered across Florida’s Gulf continental shelf though vary in size, shape and depth, but most are rich in ecological diversity with  plants and animals. NOAA-supported project has come out with new findings of one such blue hole called Amberjack Hole. Last year, in May and September, a team ...