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Meet the Saccorhytus, your oldest ancestor and your newest nightmare. This week a team of paleontologists described a new link in the chain of human evolution — and it isn’t pretty. With its “bag-like body,” “prominent mouth” and no anus (it likely excreted waste from openings by its mouth, almost like primitive gills), the Saccorhytus looks like it crawled off the set of “Alien,” but researchers say the millimeter-long organism is a key early branch off our tree of life. Look into the gaping maw of our oldest ancestors Look into the gaping maw of our oldest ancestors A 540-million-year-old...

This is something you may not have given much thought to, but leeches have wonderful saliva. "Within the leech saliva there is a substance in there called hirudin," Jim Tomsche said. "And there's other things in their saliva as well ... which allows blood flow to expand or vessels to open up their blood supply and also has an anesthetic effect." If that news doesn't make your blood flow, it might some day when you need it the most. Medically used for bloodletting purposes for thousands of years, Hirudo medicinalis — the medicinal leech — is back on the job...

August 24, 2006 was a dark day for Pluto enthusiasts. It was on that day that the International Astronomical Union established three conditions a celestial body must meet in order to be considered a planet. A planet must orbit around the sun, it must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, and it must have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit, which means, simply put, that it must have a certain amount of gravitational pull. Pluto does not meet the third condition, so once those rules were put in place, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet,” 75...

A record radiation level has been detected inside the No. 2 reactor at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, with the estimated reading of up to 530 sieverts per hour, the plant operator said Thursday. The reading means a person could die from even brief exposure, highlighting the difficulties ahead as the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. grope their way toward dismantling all three reactors that melted down in the March 2011 nuclear disaster. The plant operator also announced that based on an image analysis, a 1-square-meter hole has been found on a metal grating beneath the...

The team expects to complete the study by the end of September and publish its findings in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal. Should the study reveal a statistical correlation, team members said the results won’t necessarily imply a causal link. However, it would provide the first thorough research into this hypothesis and offer the first step toward determining if it’s correct.

54 0 MORE Partner Series NASA's Juno spacecraft has flown by Jupiter for the fourth time. Juno skimmed about 2,670 miles (4,300 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops at 7:57 a.m. EST (1257 GMT) this morning (Feb. 2), zooming by at 129,000 mph (208,000 km/h) relative to the giant planet, NASA officials said. All eight of Juno's science instruments were on and collecting data during the flyby if all went according to plan, they added. "Revelations include that Jupiter's magnetic fields and aurora are bigger and more powerful than originally thought and that the belts and zones that give the gas...

Did Complex Flight Feathers "Emerge"? Evolution News & Views February 2, 2017 2:34 AM | Permalink Here's a thought experiment. Consider something you know is intelligently designed: for example, software code for an app that flies a drone. Now let's describe its "emergence" in Darwinian langauge: Once assembly language emerged, it diversified into logic gates of increasing complexity, as crawling robots co-opted various functions for novel adaptations, including powered flight. The coding mechanism driving this spectacular process remains unclear. Through morphological analysis of robots in various stages of development, we identify two logic gates that act as major controllers for...

How to Spot a Fake Science News Story By Alex Berezow After more than six years in science journalism, I have reached two very disturbing conclusions about the craft.First, too many science journalists don't actually possess a well-rounded knowledge of science. In many cases, regular reporters are asked to cover complex science and health stories. What we end up with is entirely predictable: Articles that are nothing more than rehashed press releases, topped with click-bait headlines based on exaggerations and misunderstandings of the original research. That's how a nonsensical story like Nutella causing cancer goes viral. Second, science journalists are every bit...

The Earth’s continuously changing magnetic field surrounds the planet like an invisible force field – deflecting highly charged solar particles. Reversals are the rule, not the exception. Earth has settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, although it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal, the Brunhes-Matuyama, that occurred around 780,000 years ago. A temporary reversal, the Laschamp event, occurred around 41,000 years ago, and lasted less than 1,000 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years. Our planet’s history...

As the artist held his orb up to the sky, you might sooner guess that we were touring Saruman’s tower in Middle Earth than an extraction facility in Seattle. But this globe is no crystal ball or palantir – it’s 3,000 grams of pure cannabis extract measuring up to a staggering 99% THC. Its creators at X-tracted Labs call them Dragon Balls (like in the popular manga, and I can only imagine that collecting seven of these would get you high enough to think you’ve summoned Shenron), and beholding them in-person is somewhat of a religious experience for any connoisseurs...

At Age 180, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution a Materialist House of Cards By Tom BethellLittle known fact: The year 2017 is likely the 180th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. If that number sounds high, it’s because while Darwin had worked out his theory of evolution by 1837, he didn’t go public with it until 1858.Why the delay? Evolution itself wasn’t the problem. Earlier in the century, it was openly discussed. Darwin’s own grandfather had broached the subject. The problem, according paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, was that Darwin’s theory of evolution was distinguished from others by its materialism.Previous writings...

oden268 8 months ago · 188k reads New DNA Study Shows Humans Bred With Unknown Species Denisovans interbred with yet another extinct population that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago — one that is neither human nor Neanderthal.Updated genome sequences from two extinct relatives of modern humans suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a member of an archaic human group called the Denisovans, were presented at a meeting on ancient DNA at the Royal Society in...

Life on Earth may have made its mark on the moon billions of years before Neil Armstrong’s famous first step.Observations by Japan’s moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft suggest that oxygen atoms from Earth’s upper atmosphere bombard the moon’s surface for a few days each month. This oxygen onslaught began in earnest around 2.4 billion years ago when photosynthetic microbes first flourished (SN Online: 9/8/15), planetary scientist Kentaro Terada of Osaka University in Japan and colleagues propose January 30 in Nature Astronomy.The oxygen atoms begin their incredible journey in the upper atmosphere, where they are ionized by ultraviolet radiation, the researchers suggest. Electric...

A large, canyon-shaped hole has opened in the sun's atmosphere, and it is spewing a stream of solar wind directly toward Earth. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the structure, which stretches more than halfway across the face of the sun:(see pic below) This is a "coronal hole" (CH)--a region where the sun's magnetic field opens up and allows solar wind to escape. NASA's STEREO spacecraft recently sampled the stream flowing from this hole and the velocity was unusually high: nearly 750 km/s. Such a fast-moving stream will likely spark Arctic auroras when it arrives on Feb. 1st.

"This material could be used to help stabilize temperature," said researcher Fan Yang.Researchers have discovered a metal that fails to comply with the Wiedemann-Franz Law, the rule that suggests good conductors of electricity will also be good conductors of thermal energy. Metallic vanadium dioxide easily carries an electric current, but fails to conduct heat as expected. "This was a totally unexpected finding," Junqiao Wu, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a news release. "It shows a drastic breakdown of a textbook law that has been known to be robust for conventional...

Now, two teams of researchers have figured out that crystals' repeating patterns can also exist through time. These "time crystals," detailed in a new paper in Physical Review Letter, are an entirely new kind of matter, one that can never reach equilibrium. To create the time crystals, researchers at University of Maryland hooked together 10 ytterbium atoms and hit them with two lasers multiple times to keep them out of equilibrium. Though the atoms did settle into a pattern, they could not reach equilibrium, meaning that the crystals perpetually remain in motion, though they don't contain any energy. Almost all...

For months now, there's been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals - strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in perpetual motion without energy. ... But time crystals have a structure that repeats in time, not just in space. And it keep oscillating in its ground state. ...

A woman believes she can cure blindness by licking patients' eyeballs, and she has been told people want to chop out her tongue if she dies to preserve the spiritual power. An 80-year-old lady, Hava Celebic, has claimed she is a spiritual healer and has the gift to cure those with the disability by simply wiggling her tongue around their organ, and it has been reported locals plan on cutting out her mouth muscle when she passes away to continue to heal people as her children are "too disgusted" to follow in her footsteps. According to the Mirror Online Hava...

Just before midnight on Jan. 27, 1700, Japan woke to a massive tsunami, a surprise since no one there felt the earthquake that would’ve caused it. Years later, scientists finally figured out why – it all started in Cascadia, exactly 317 years ago. Samurai, merchants and villagers wrote of minor flooding and damage. Confusion abounded. After all, there had been no tremor in Japan that would’ve given locals warning of a rogue wave.The “orphan tsunami” wouldn’t be linked to the parent earthquake, which originated in the geologically active Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia subduction zone, until the 1990s. The zone hosts a...

Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered a 100-million-year-old insect preserved in amber with a triangular head, almost-alien and "E.T.-like" appearance and features so unusual that it has been placed in its own scientific "order" -- an incredibly rare event. There are about 1 million described species of insects, and millions more still to be discovered, but every species of insect on Earth has been placed in only 31 existing orders. Now there's one more. The findings have been published in the journal Cretaceous Research and describe this small, wingless female insect that probably lived in fissures in the bark...