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“It was kind of unbelievable that it was real data,” said Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. “We were scratching our heads. For any idea that came up there was always something that would argue against it.” She was talking to the New Scientist about KIC 8462852, a distant star with a very unusual flickering habit. Something was making the star dim drastically every few years, and she wasn’t sure what. Boyajian wrote up a paper on possible explanations for the star’s bizarre behavior, and it was published recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. But she also...

Paris (AFP) - A rapidly melting glacier atop East Antarctica is on track to lift oceans at least two metres, and could soon pass a "tipping point" of no return, researchers said Wednesday. To date, scientists have mostly worried about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets as dangerous drivers of sea level rise. But the new study, following up on earlier work by the same team, has identified a third major threat to hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas around the world. "I predict that before the end of the century the great global cities of...

In fact, deep ocean circulation slowed down to such an extent that the heavy, saline water mass below a depth of 2000 metres was not in contact with the surface for almost 3000 years. "During this time, so much bound carbon in the form of animal and algae remains trickled down from the more intermixed sea surface into the deep water layer that we were able to identify it as the major carbon reservoir that we have looked for so intensively," says Thomas Ronge. The data also showed that the already old age of the water masses was artificially increased...

KT Boundary and Iridium Ever dreamt of hiking over the landscape and finding a mineral vein rich with ores, perhaps even silver or gold glittering in the sunshine, like in the Hand of Faith vein in Australia? How about joining the gold rush fever—without trekking up the Chilkoot Pass as thousands of prospectors did well over 100 years ago? The chances of finding a “mother lode” are slim, even when trying hard. They are similar to winning the jackpot in a big lottery. But don’t give up just yet; there is a new “horizon” for your exploration activity—the new frontiers...

Space impact 'saved Christianity' By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history? About the size of a football field: The impact crater left behind A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity. It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and...

In the early hours this morning, people that were awake and looking up at the sky in the northeastern United States and far eastern Canada were treated to a magnificent display as a meteorite burned up in the atmosphere, brightening the entire sky for a second as it went.The American Meteor Society, which reported the event and compiled images and videos taken by night owls and people lucky enough to have dash cams or web cams pointing in the right direction at the right time.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have discovered how a tiny yet abundant ocean organism helps regulate the Earth’s climate. Research published today in Nature Microbiology reveals how a bacterial group called ‘Pelagibacterales’ plays an important function in keeping the Earth’s atmosphere stable. The project was led by Prof Steve Giovannoni and Dr Jing Sun at Oregon State University, in collaboration with researchers from UEA among others. They showed that these tiny, hugely abundant bacteria could make the environmentally important gas, dimethyl sulfide. Researchers at UEA identified and characterised the gene that is responsible for this property. Dr...

Scientists have found evidence of a huge asteroid that struck the Earth early in its life with an impact larger than anything humans have experienced. Tiny glass beads called spherules, found in north-western Australia were formed from vaporised material from the asteroid impact, said Dr Andrew Glikson from The Australian National University (ANU). "The impact would have triggered earthquakes orders of magnitude greater than terrestrial earthquakes, it would have caused huge tsunamis and would have made cliffs crumble," said Dr Glikson, from the ANU Planetary Institute. "Material from the impact would have spread worldwide. These spherules were found in sea...

Devastating 'World War ZERO' destroyed ancient Mediterranean civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age 11:41, 13 MAY 2016 UPDATED 11:44, 13 MAY 2016 BY JASPER HAMILL Controversial theory finally identifies mysterious 'Sea Peoples' blamed for cataclysmic series of events which changed the course of history It was a disaster which destroyed the ancient world's greatest civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age that lasted centuries. Now one archaeologist think he's worked out who's to blame for sparking an event he calls "World War Zero", but which most academics refer to as the The Late Bronze Age Collapse ....

The Trojan War was a grander event than even Homer would have us believe. The famous conflict may have been one of the final acts in what one archaeologist has controversially dubbed "World War Zero" -- an event he claims brought the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world crashing down 3200 years ago. And the catalyst for the war? A mysterious and arguably powerful civilisation almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists: the Luwians. By the second millennium BC, civilisation had taken hold throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian New Kingdom coexisted with the Hittites of central Anatolia and the Mycenaeans of mainland...

Discovered in June 2005, Pluto’s outermost moon Hydra is thought to have formed four billion years ago during a massive impact event that created Pluto and Charon. Despite its age, this 31-mile-wide moon appeared remarkably clean and bright in New Horizons images during the spacecraft’s historic close pass through the Pluto system in July 2015. Scientists’ initial speculation was proved right when data from the spacecraft was analyzed and revealed that Hydra, like its name [??], is covered in nearly pure water ice. Measured with the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) on New Horizons’ Ralph instrument, the spectral signature...

This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won’t be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater—the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the...

ERRIADH, TUNISIA // In 586BC the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar laid waste to Jerusalem, inadvertently sowing seeds for a Jewish haven across the sea that has outlived his realm by 25 centuries and counting. Legend tells that refugees fled to the Tunisian island of Djerba, carrying a block from the ruined Temple of Solomon. Today it lies beneath the El Ghriba synagogue, the cornerstone of a thriving Jewish community. And after decades of Jewish exodus from Arab countries, that community is growing. For western holidaymakers, Djerba is a strip of lavish resorts along a sandy Mediterranean coast. For Tunisians, it also...

A new chemical analysis of lunar material collected by Apollo astronauts in the 1970s conflicts with the widely held theory that a giant collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object gave birth to the moon 4.5 billion years ago.

Using the oldest fossil micrometeorites -- space dust -- ever found, Monash University-led research has made a surprising discovery about the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago. The findings of a new study published today in the journal Nature -- led by Dr Andrew Tomkins and a team from the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash, along with scientists from the Australian Synchrotron and Imperial College, London -- challenge the accepted view that Earth's ancient atmosphere was oxygen-poor. The findings indicate instead that the ancient Earth's upper atmosphere contained about the same amount of oxygen as...

The Egyptian-German Archaeological Mission to Matariya (Ministry of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Egyptian Museum University of Leipzig, University of Applied Sciences Mainz) has discovered new evidence for a sanctuary of Nectanebo I (380-363 BC) in the temple precinct of Heliopolis, according to Dr. Mahmoud Afify, head of the ancient Egyptian antiquities sector at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. Dr. Aiman Ashmawy, head of the Egyptian team at the Mission, said the number of blocks from a limited area proves that the excavation area is the site of the original building built of limestone reliefs and columns, with...

Southern California’s section of the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded and ready to roll,” a leading earthquake scientist said Wednesday at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach. The San Andreas fault is one of California’s most dangerous, and is the state’s longest fault. Yet for Southern California, the last big earthquake to strike the southern San Andreas was in 1857, when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake ruptured an astonishing 185 miles between Monterey County and the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. It has been quiet since then — too quiet, said Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California...

The southeastern United States has been hit by a series of strange unexplained quakes - most recently, the 2011 magnitude-5.8 earthquake near Mineral, Virginia that shook the nation's capital. Researchers have been baffled, believing the areas should be relatively quiet in terms of seismic activity, as it is located in the interior of the North American Plate, far away from plate boundaries where earthquakes usually occur. Now, they believe the quakes could be caused by pieces of the Earth's mantle breaking off and sinking into the planet.

Lunar swirls can be tens of miles across and appear in groups or just as an isolated feature. Previous observations yielded two significant clues about their formation: First, they appear where ancient bits of magnetic field are embedded in the lunar crust (although not every “fossil” magnetic field on the moon has a lunar swirl). Second, the bright areas in the swirls appear to be less weathered than their surroundings. The space environment is harsh; many things can cause material exposed to space to change chemically and darken over time, including impacts from microscopic meteorites and the effects of the...

On 14 April, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake struck the Japanese island of Kyushu. Two days later, Japanese officials reported towering plumes of smoke at Mount Aso, a volcano 42 kilometers away from the quake’s epicenter. A small eruption was occurring. Could the distant earthquake have triggered it? Mount Aso has had far bigger eruptions over the past few years, well before the earthquake occurred, so it was probably just a coincidence. But a new study concludes that the idea of so-called far-field triggering is not so far-fetched. Big earthquakes can slosh around the bubbly magma underneath volcanoes hundreds of kilometers away,...