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Earth is “well-hidden” to extraterrestrial observers using photometric microlensing to hunt for habitable planets that might support life, an international team of researchers has concluded. The findings could also help to narrow down the best areas of the galaxy to target in our own searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). When looking for potentially inhabited planets beyond the solar system, astronomers have a variety of tools at their disposal. As it stands, by far the most successful of these has been the transit technique, which has made about 75% of all the exoplanet discoveries so far. This approach involves watching for...

South Australia's Naracoorte Caves is one of the world's best fossil sites, containing a record spanning more than half a million years. Among the remains preserved in layers of sand are the bones of many iconic Australian megafauna species that became extinct between 48,000 and 37,000 years ago.The reasons for the demise of these megafauna species are intensely debated. But the older the fossils we can find, the better we can understand the species' evolution and extinction.To date, determining the precise age of the caves has been difficult. However our research demonstrates, for the first time, how old Naracoorte's caves...

Whenever "Gina," a fifth grader at a suburban public school on the East Coast, did her math homework, she never had to worry about whether she could get help from her mom. "I help her a lot with homework," Gina's mother, a married, mid-level manager for a health care company, explained to us during an interview for a study we did about how teachers view students who complete their homework versus those who do not. "I try to maybe re-explain things, like, things she might not understand," Gina's mom continued. "Like, if she's struggling, I try to teach her a...

How many stars are there in our galaxy? How many grains of sand in the Sahara? How many ants live on Earth? These are all questions that seem impossible to answer. However, through intensive and extensive data analysis, science is coming amazingly close to finding the solutions. When it comes to ants, a team led by Würzburg biologists Sabine Nooten and Patrick Schultheiss has done just that. Schultheiss has been conducting research at the Chair of Behavioral Biology and Sociobiology at Julius Maximilians University (JMU) since 2022. He was drawn to Würzburg from the University of Hong Kong. The publication...

Twice as nice: The two-headed garter snake is in the care of the Herpetology lab on East Campus. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln's herpetology lab is seeing double after securing a two-headed garter snake. The newborn bicephalic garter snake was discovered by Joshua Marshall of Hastings while clearing brush in Clay Center on Sept. 4. "I lifted up a log and wasn't surprised to see two small snakes, but then I realized that they weren't making great progress because there were two heads," he said. Once Marshall realized it was a two-headed snake, he placed it in a jar and...

Fluorescence microscopy images showing the endoplasmic reticulum network (green) wrapping around damaged lysosomes (red). The cell nucleus is shown in blue. Today in Nature, University of Pittsburgh researchers describe for the first time a pathway by which cells repair damaged lysosomes, structures that contribute to longevity by recycling cellular trash. The findings are an important step towards understanding and treating age-related diseases driven by leaky lysosomes. "Lysosome damage is a hallmark of aging and many diseases, particularly neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's," said lead author Jay Xiaojun Tan, Ph.D., assistant professor of cell biology at Pitt's School of Medicine...

Gold coin hoard in a cup found under kitchen floorA couple in North Yorkshire hit the kind of jackpot every history nerd has dreamed of: they discovered an early 18th century coin hoard buried under the floorboards of their kitchen. With more than 260 gold coins dating to between 1610 and 1727, it is one of the largest hoards of English 18th century coins ever found.They found the hoard in July 2019 after pulling up the kitchen floors in their 18th century home. Six inches beneath the concrete underfloor, they spotted what they thought was an old electrical wire but...

Andromeda galaxy in far-infrared. Astronomy has a blind spot in the area of far-infrared radiation compared to most other wavelengths. A far-infrared space telescope can only utilize its full sensitivity with an actively cooled mirror at temperatures below 4 Kelvin (-269 ℃). Such a telescope doesn't exist yet, which is why there has been little worldwide investment in the development of corresponding detectors.In 2004, SRON decided to break this cycle and invest in the development of Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs). Now, researchers from SRON and TU Delft have achieved the highest possible sensitivity, comparable to feeling the warmth of...

Thousands of dead fish and other marine life carcasses are washing ashore in the San Francisco Bay Area, creating a foul smell. Experts point to an unprecedented "red tide" algae bloom as the mostly likely cause. Abnormal numbers of dead crabs, bat rays, striped bass, white sturgeon and more have been spotted throughout the Bay area over the last week, officials say, notably at Oakland's Lake Merritt. The start of the fish die-off could date back even further—as the harmful algae bloom has been spreading since late July. The carcasses are worrying environmental scientists, as they mark a devastating loss...

Schematic diagram of the newly discovered Ross 508 planetary system. The green region represents the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the planetary surface. The planetary orbit is shown as a blue line. A Planet has Been Found That Shifts In and Out of the Habitable Zone A super-Earth planet has been found orbiting a red dwarf star, only 37 light-years from the Earth. Named Ross 508 b, the newly found world has an unusual elliptical orbit that causes it to shift in and out of the habitable zone. Therefore, part of the time conditions would be...

DECATUR, Ala. (WAFF) - A pedestrian was hit and killed in the parking lot of the Walmart Neighborhood Market on 6th Avenue in Decatur. Irene Cardenas-Martinez with the Decatur Police Department says officers responded to the incident at approximately 9 p.m. on Aug. 25. At the scene, officers arrested 33-year-old Preston Nelson on the charge of murder, according to online court documents. According to the Decatur Police, Nelson parked in a handicap spot near the store’s entrance and waited until Sherry Sain came out. Once Sain was behind Nelson’s car he reversed, pinning Sain between his Mercury Grand Marquis LS...

“In some pockets of space, far beyond the limits of our observations,” wrote cosmologist Dan Hooper at the University of Chicago in an email to The Daily Galaxy, referring to the theory of eternal inflation and the inflationary multiverse: “the laws of physics could be very different from those we find in our local universe. Different forms of matter could exist, which experience different kinds of forces. In this sense, what we call ‘the laws of physics’, instead of being a universal fact of nature, could be an environmental fact, which varies from place to place, or from time to...

Hubble Ultra Deep Field It’s possible that the universe isn’t uniform past what we can see, and conditions are wildly different from place to place, says Caltech astrophysicist Sean Carroll. “That possibility is the cosmological multiverse. We don’t know if there is a multiverse in this sense, but since we can’t actually see one way or another, it’s wise to keep an open mind.” “Astronomers estimate that the observable universe — a bubble 14 billion light-years in radius, which represents how far we have been able to see since its beginning — contains at least two trillion galaxies and...

Carcharocles turgidus teeth. An 8-year-old boy made a prehistoric discovery this month by finding a giant tooth believed to be from the long-extinct angustidens—a megatooth shark species. Riley Gracely of Pennsylvania discovered the massive tooth during a family vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. According to Palmetto Fossil Excursions (PFE), the boy discovered a 4.75-inch tooth belonging to the extinct shark Carcharocles angustidens while participating in a fossil-hunting excursion near Summerville. "Truly the find of a lifetime," PFE wrote in an Aug. 11 Facebook post. "This young man just scored a 4.75" Angustiden tooth in our Premium Gravel Layer piles...

A handout image obtained on August 23, 2022 courtesy of the Dinosaur Valley State Park shows dinosaur tracks from around 113 million years ago. A drought in Texas dried up a river flowing through Dinosaur Valley State Park, exposing tracks from giant reptiles that lived some 113 million years ago, an official said Tuesday. Photos posted on Facebook show three-toed footprints leading down a dry tree-lined riverbed in the southern US state. It is "one of the longest dinosaur trackways in the world," a caption accompanying the images says. Stephanie Salinas Garcia of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department...

When you cross the Rubicon, there is no going back. Democrats are getting very close to that fateful moment. Their dream to indict Donald Trump has turned into determination, putting them on a collision course with history. No president has ever been prosecuted after leaving office ... it would tear America apart. Yet day by day, the evidence shows Dems have liberated themselves from such concerns and are resolved that this time will be different. The number and fervor of their army of prosecutors reveal a contagious fever, and it often appears they are competing to be the first to...

The reconstructed megadolon was 16 metres long and weighed over 61 tons. In a new 3D modeling study published this week in Science Advances, we show that the giant extinct shark, Otodus megalodon, was a true globetrotting super-predator. It was capable of covering vast distances in short order, and could eat the largest of modern living super-predators, the killer whale, in five gargantuan bites. It could have swallowed a great white shark whole. The largest shark that ever livedMegalodon was the largest shark that ever lived, and it was around for a long time—from around 23 million to 2.6...

Megyn Kelly doesn’t hold back

A team of researchers located at Helmholtz Munich reports on a novel function of vitamin K, which is generally known for its importance in blood clotting. The researchers discovered that the fully reduced form of vitamin K acts as an antioxidant efficiently inhibiting ferroptotic cell death. Ferroptosis is a natural form of cell death in which cellular iron plays an important role and which is characterized by the oxidative destruction of cellular membranes. In addition, the team identified FSP1 as the warfarin-insensitive enzyme reducing vitamin K, the identity of which had been postulated but remained unknown for more than half...