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New research shows 8,000-pound sloths once dug caves, adapted to oceans, and roamed widely—until climate and humans brought their downfall. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com ================================================================= Long before they became tree-hugging symbols of chill, sloths were 8,000-pound giants that roamed deserts, dug caves into cliffs, and even swam like manatees. Scientists have now pieced together the epic story of their evolution, using ancient DNA and hundreds of fossils to explain how sloths once grew to mammoth proportions—bigger than most cars—and why they eventually shrank or vanished altogether. Sloths’ Strange Family Tree Most of us know sloths as the slow-moving, tree-loving creatures...

Martin Köhler, a PhD candidate with the University of Queensland's School of the Environment, said the odd discovery was made while he and other researchers were exploring the southern side of the island of Tongatapu."It was late in the day, and we were talking to some farmers when they directed us to this boulder," ...Köhler says that the massive boulder's location much further inland beyond the team's field work area means that it must have been transported there by some tremendous force...When the first erratics were identified in the 18th century, they were initially considered a major paradox. However, it...

During the 1970s, excavations at the Al-Asasif necropolis on Luxor's west bank uncovered an elaborate rock-cut tomb. Archaeologists theorized that it must have belonged to an Egyptian dignitary, but at the time they were unable to identify the deceased and the tomb was labeled with the generic name of Kampp 23. Now, Ahram Online reports, a joint Egyptian-Canadian team has finally determined that the Kampp 23 tomb was built for a man named Amun-Mes, the erstwhile mayor of Thebes during the Ramesside period (ca. 1295–1070 b.c.). Several inscriptions found elsewhere in Luxor mention a certain Amun-Mes along with many other...

SICILY, Italy – Italy’s Mount Etna volcano violently erupted on Monday, sending plumes of toxic ash and smoke billowing into the sky as people on the mountain ran for safety to escape the danger. According to Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), activity at Mount Etna on Sicily began during the pre-dawn hours on Monday and culminated with "intense and almost continuous" strombolian explosions hours later. The INGV said that strombolian activity is a relatively low-level volcanic eruption, during which a modest amount of energy is released. Dramatic photos and video showed dangerous pyroclastic flows racing down the...

A new World Meteorological Organization report spells the end of the goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.Seven years ago, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the world wouldn’t warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels until 2040.Then two years ago, the group predicted the world would pass that threshold between 2030 and 2035.Now, new data from the World Meteorological Organization released Wednesday indicates that the Earth will cross this point in just two years.The accelerated timeline is due to higher-than-expected temperatures over the past few years, diminishing air pollution that cooled the...

Over the decades, NASA has managed to capture a number of astonishing photos from space, showcasing how beautiful the cosmos really is. Take these unique details on Saturn’s moon Iapetus as the perfect example. Or how about an eerie snapshot taken by the so-called ‘most isolated man in the universe?’ These photos have a way of pulling you in and honestly, I could scroll through them for hours on end. I'm not alone; one social media user has re-shared two stunning photos of Uranus captured by NASA which have since gone viral. The US agency launched its James Webb Space...

Researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the magnetar called SGR 0501+4516 is traversing our galaxy from an unknown place of origin. Researchers say that this runaway magnetar is the likeliest candidate in our Milky Way galaxy for a magnetar that was not born in a supernova explosion as initially predicted. It is so strange it might even offer clues to the mechanism behind events known as fast radio bursts...But a decade-long study with Hubble cast doubt on the magnetar's birthplace. After initial observations with ground-based telescopes shortly after SGR 0501+4516's discovery, researchers used Hubble's exquisite sensitivity and steady...

A joint Egyptian-French archaeological mission recently made a series of new discoveries at the mortuary temple of the pharaoh Ramesses II, La Brújula Verde reports. Known as the Ramesseum and the "House of Millions of Years," the complex was erected by Ramesses on the Nile's west bank across from ancient Thebes during the thirteenth century b.c. Among the new findings were a series of tombs dating to the Third Intermediate Period (ca. 1069–525 b.c.). These contained burial chambers, shafts with canopic jars, sarcophagi, and more than 400 funerary figurines. They also located storerooms for jars of honey, olive oil, animal...

Approximately 14,000 years ago, the unprecedented solar event—now judged to be the most powerful known to have occurred—marked Earth’s transition into the Holocene epoch, according to the findings of an international team of scientists. The team traces the event to around 12,350 BC using a new climate-chemistry model specifically designed to reconstruct ancient solar particle activity. This expands the known timeline for ancient solar storms and raises the bar on the upper boundaries of their intensity. Although the event in question was already known from past observations of radiocarbon spikes in ancient wood samples, its scale and magnitude remained unknown....

Fossil pollen from the end-Permian extinction reveals increased UV-B protection compounds, linking volcanic activity, ozone loss, and ecosystem collapse during Earth's most severe mass extinction.Scientists from China, Germany, and the UK led by Prof. LIU Feng from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) have revealed that pollen preserved in 250-million-year-old rocks contains abundant compounds that function like sunscreen but are produced by plants to protect themselves from harmful ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation.The presence of these compounds suggests that a pulse of UV-B played an essential role in the end-Permian mass extinction event...Accompanying this...

The Greek alphabet might be centuries older than once thought, according to a statement released by the University of Leiden. Scholars theorize that the script emerged around the eighth century b.c., after the ancient Greeks adapted the older Phoenician alphabet -- which was composed of only consonants and no vowels -- to fit their own needs. This period in Greek history was the purported time of the poet Homer, who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. However, University of Leiden classicist Willemijn Waal has recently suggested the Greek written language appears on pottery earlier than that, and likely dates back...

On Tuesday, astronomers watched as a vast 'bird wing' eruption sent waves of superheated plasma surging across the sun's northern hemisphere. At over 600,000 miles long (one million km), the filament of solar material was more than twice as long as the distance from the Earth to the moon. Now, scientists predict that part of this filament eruption could hit Earth tomorrow. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, aurora chaser Jure Atanackov predicted that the full force of this eruption could trigger a severe or even extreme geomagnetic storm, the highest level on official rating systems. Stunning video recorded...

On March 28th, 2025, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck Myanmar, causing a rupture in about 460 kilometers (290 miles) of the Sagaing fault line that runs through most of the country, causing shaking of at least intensity X on the Modified Mercalli scale. As heavy shaking was felt throughout much of Myanmar as well as other neighboring countries, the fault line moved side-to-side by as much 6 meters (20 feet) in some places, a movement which was captured by the camera in this video. This is the first (and currently only) known instance of a fault line motion being captured...

When a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Dr John Clauser, labels the claims about greenhouse gases warming the Earth as “pseudoscience” and describes them as “a dangerous corruption of science,” I urge you to take notice. He further stated that “the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation,” and remarked that climate science has “metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”Similarly, Professor Harold (Hal) Lewis, a distinguished physicist, called such claims “the biggest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud” he had encountered in his lifetime. Another German physicist expressed outrage upon discovering that much of what the IPCC and the media presented...

Deep beneath the thick ice that covers East Antarctica, scientists are revealing new discoveries about a mystery that has been hidden beneath the continent’s frozen exterior for half a billion years. According to newly published research, clues to the formation of a mountain range the size of the Alps tucked away below Antarctic ice are being revealed, offering geologists a unique glimpse at the processes behind their formation. The Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains, initially discovered by Soviet scientists during an expedition in 1958, have puzzled researchers for decades. Now, these massive features beneath Antarctica’s frozen surface, which were formed long ago...

CREDIT: NASA, ESA, STScI, Yuhan Yao (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) ************************************************************** A traveling black hole stalking the cosmos for stellar prey recently revealed itself to NASA telescopes in a tidal disruption event (TDE), shredding and swallowing a star in a radioactive burst. With its brilliant flash, the TDE AT2024tvd lit up several observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the NRAO Very Large Array. The TDE event took place 600 million light-years from Earth, allowing astronomers a new glimpse at black hole physics to be published in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal...

Sometimes, all the details line up just right to make an incredible story. It just took these dominoes some 10,000 years to line up. This is the story of the Gribben Basin buried forest outside of Marquette, Michigan. They Accidentally Found an 11,000-Year-Old Forest. Twice. | 16:38 Alexis Dahl | 105K subscribers | 122,241 views | April 25, 2025

Archaeological excavations at the ancient site of Megiddo in northern Israel, also known as "Armageddon," have unearthed a significant amount of 7th-century BCE Egyptian pottery, potentially providing the first physical evidence of the battle between King Josiah of Judah and Pharaoh Necho of Egypt, as documented in the biblical books of Kings II and Chronicles.A team of Israeli archaeologists, led by Prof. Israel Finkelstein of the University of Haifa and Dr. Assaf Kleiman of Ben Gurion University, detailed their findings in two academic papers published earlier this year. The unprecedented quantity of Egyptian ceramic vessels discovered at Megiddo suggests a...

SNIP To understand the text, we need to know a little about the obelisk’s history. Before it was gifted to Paris, the monument used to be one of two that stood outside the Luxor Temple in Upper Egypt. Both pillars were built around the 13th century BCE, at the time of Ramses II’s reign. But at this time, the obelisk that is now in Paris would have had a face that could be seen by passengers traveling along the Nile River, and it is from this angle (around 45°) that the secret message is visible.“When I calculated where to stand...

A sixth-century "mini" ice age may have been "the straw that broke the camel's back" that led to the final disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, a new study claims...By studying rocks carried by icebergs from Greenland all the way to Iceland's west coast, a team of researchers has uncovered what they believe is more evidence for the severity of this mini ice age. Their findings, published April 8 in the journal Geology, point to the prolonged cooling being a key factor in the eventual decline of the Western Roman Empire — although not all historians agree...Economic crisis, government corruption,...