Imagine that prolonged climate change eventually makes all the dolphins disappear from the world’s oceans. Unlikely – and shocking – as that may be, it actually happened in the past to another group of marine creatures: the ichthyosaurs. During the dinosaur era, these “fish-reptiles” were a predominant group of marine predators, with some of the […]
Modern day native people in Brazil have traces of Australasian, DNA raising new questions about how and when the first Americans arrived. Two separate genetic analyses have found evidence for a surprising genetic link between the native populations of the Americas and Oceania. The DNA of some native Amazonians shows significant similarity to indigenous inhabitants […]
The western edge of Pluto’s “heart” as seen on July 14 by New Horizons. (NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI) The latest intriguing feature spotted on Pluto is a new mountain range — one with peaks as tall as the Appalachian Mountains on Earth. The new range, shown in the image above, joins one discovered earlier that’s comparable in height to […]
Computer vision experts from Queen Mary University of London have developed software that’s already better than humans at recognising what hand-drawn sketches are supposed to represent. The program, known as Sketch-a-Net, is a ‘deep neural network’, meaning it emulates how the human brain processes inputs. It gathers data from both the shape of the object […]
When James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, has something to say about the effects of climate change, people tend to listen up. According to a report from Slate, Hansen, along with 16 other coauthors, has concluded in a new study that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will likely melt 10 times faster than previous […]
NASA Dramatic photos of Earth from space are nothing new, but few are as dramatic as this. NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite has captured its first photo to show the entire sunlit side of the Earth. The space agency called the eye-popping image “EPIC” — a play on the abbreviation for DSCOVR’s Earth Polychromatic […]
