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Explanation: In this composited night skyscape, stacked exposures trace graceful star trails above Lake Toolondo, Victoria, Australia, planet Earth. Captured while the lunar eclipse of March 3 was in progress, the exposures used were made during the hour-long total eclipse phase. So faint star trails are easily visible along with the trail of the reddened Moon in the eclipse-darkened skies above the lake and trees. Of course, the apparent motion of Moon and stars revealed in the timelapse composite reflect the Earth's daily rotation around its axis. Dramatically punctuating the Moon's trail as totality ended, a single, separate telephoto image...

The National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) and Firebird Motorsports Park officials announced time changes for the upcoming FMP NHRA Arizona Nationals presented by NGK Spark Plugs, which takes place March 20-22. Taking an abundance of caution for the expected heat in the weekend forecast, racing in the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series will shift to earlier in the morning on each day, setting up a Coffee and Nitro weekend at the Duel in the Desert. Friday qualifying will begin at 9:30 a.m. local time on Friday with Pro Stock, followed by Funny Car and Top Fuel. The second session...

According to a statement released by the Nature Publishing Group, Anopheles leucosphyrus mosquitoes may have evolved to feed on humans in Southeast Asia. Upasana Shyamsunder Singh of Vanderbilt University, Catherine Walton of the University of Manchester, and their colleagues sequenced DNA from 38 modern-day mosquitoes from 11 species in the leucosphyrus group. Then the researchers employed computer models and estimates of DNA mutation rates to reconstruct the evolution of these mosquitoes. The study suggests that the bugs switched from feeding on non-human primates to early humans in the region of Sundaland, an area including the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, and...

Tradition holds that the eldest son of Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongol Empire, founded the Golden Horde and was buried in Kazakhstan with his descendants. According to a statement released by the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison), an international team of researchers led by Ayken Askapuli of UW–Madison analyzed genomes taken from remains found in four Golden Horde tombs in Kazakhstan, and determined that their ancestors could be traced to the Mongolian plateau through their Y-chromosomes. “We saw evidence that their Y-chromosomes are part of a branch of the C3* cluster,” Askapuli said. Some 20 years ago, fragments of DNA...

The “Melania” documentary about first lady Melania Trump debuted at the top of Amazon Prime’s streaming charts after premiering earlier this week. The documentary, which follows 20 days in the first lady’s life before President Donald Trump’s second term in office, hit the streaming service Monday. Just one day after its premiere, “Melania” became the most-streamed film on the platform and the most-streamed content overall in the United States, according to Flix Patrol. The first lady celebrated the feat in a post on X Tuesday. As of Thursday, the film is the third most-streamed overall behind the Amazon Prime series...

A flying taxi took a spin over San Francisco Thursday — and the Bay Area’s tech crowd was there to watch. The small electric aircraft from Joby Aviation flew across San Francisco Bay near the Golden Gate Bridge during a demonstration flight that drew reporters and industry guests to the St. Francis Yacht Club. The flight is part of the company’s push to launch electric air taxis — small vertical takeoff planes designed to carry passengers on short trips of roughly 10 to 50 miles. Joby’s aircraft seats four passengers and uses six propellers. The company says rides could cost...

For around 700 years, Native people of the American Great Plains hunted bison at a site in central Montana that archaeologists call Bergstrom. Then, around 1,100 years ago, humans abandoned the site even though bison remained abundant in the area, according to a statement released by Frontiers. "The Bergstrom site presented a puzzle," paleoecologist John Wendt of New Mexico State University said. "Why would hunters stop using a site that had worked for so long?" In 2019, Wendt's team began digging and investigating three-foot-by-three-foot excavation pits to try to better understand the Bergstrom site's use and eventual disuse. Researchers collected...

Explanation: For the first time we are witnessing outer planet Uranus take center stage and pirouette. Uranus is one of the Solar System’s strangest planets, lying on its side and spinning like a rotisserie chicken. The featured video is composed of over 1000 spectra taken over 15 hours of continuous viewing by JWST's NIRSpec instrument while Uranus rotates. The data captures the behavior of Uranus’s ionosphere: the ionized layer of a planet’s atmosphere that strongly interacts with the planet's magnetic field. The aurora’s rosy glow traces the complex interplay between Uranus's misaligned rotation and magnetic axes. Clouds can be seen...

WASHINGTON — The White House is privately pushing congressional lawmakers to keep their cool as the war in Iran wraps up its 12th day, arguing it is critical to root out threats from the Islamic Republic against the US and its allies. The message from the White House to jittery Republicans is that the “short-term spike” at the pump is needed for a “long-term gain,” a White House official told The Post. While Republicans in Congress are largely cheering on President Trump’s military campaign in Iran — at least publicly — many of them are anticipating fallout and potential midterm...

Giants co-owner Steve Tisch announced he will give up his shares of the football team and pass them on to his children after being exposed for asking Jeffrey Epstein about a “working girl” in a series of damning emails about women, sources confirmed to The Post. Tisch, 77, requested to transfer the 23.1% stake in Big Blue that he shares with his siblings, Laurie and Jonathan, to his and their children. The move would leave the elder Tisch siblings with no ownership of the team if the NFL’s finance committee approved the move, first reported by ESPN. The team is...

Explanation: Is this a cosmic monster ready to devour an unsuspecting galaxy? Thankfully, that is not the case. The red “monster” shown in the featured image is Cometary Globule CG 4, 1,300 light-years away in the Constellation Puppis. CG 4 is a molecular cloud, where hydrogen becomes cold enough to form molecules that can be brought together by gravity to create stars. The shape of CG 4 resembles that of a comet, but its head is 1.5 light-year in diameter and its tail is 8 light-years long; for comparison, the distance from the Earth to the sun is only 8...

According to a statement released by Saarland University, repeated lines, notches, dots, and crosses etched on Paleolithic artifacts some 40,000 years ago exhibit the same level of complexity and information density as proto-cuneiform script, which emerged around 3000 B.C. Linguist Christian Bentz of Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin used computers to analyze the statistical properties of more than 3,000 signs on 260 Paleolithic artifacts. “We hypothesized that the early proto-cuneiform script would be more similar to the writing systems of today, especially due to their relative proximity in time,”...

According to a statement released by the University of Gdansk, evaluation of the remains of people who lived in what is now north-central Poland between 4100 and 1230 B.C. has revealed how their diets changed from the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age. Using radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis, and stable isotope measurements of carbon and nitrogen, a team led by Łukasz Pospieszny of the University of Gdansk suggests that Corded Ware communities of the late Neolithic period herded their animals in forests and wet river valleys. After several hundred years, however, their diet began to resemble that of nearby farmers,...

A 600-kilogram NASA satellite will enter Earth’s atmosphere tomorrow. The Van Allen Probe A research satellite, weighing approximately 600 kilograms and launched in 2011, is scheduled to enter Earth’s atmosphere on March 11. The Space Force’s estimated reentry time is just that — an estimate. It will be updated in the coming hours, as more and better data come in.”

Isaac’s energy level, enthusiasm, and talkativeness were too much—at least for a traditional classroom.He had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); one psychologist explained that he had a high IQ but low maturity.Illustration by Lumi LiuIt wasn’t until Heather Rodden began homeschooling him in fifth grade that she realized what years of frustrated teachers couldn’t put their fingers on—what looked like a liability in one setting can flourish in another.Like Rodden, other parents, researchers, and professionals are moving away from treating ADHD purely as a disorder that 1 in 10 kids have.The word “deficit” in ADHD, they argue,...

According to a statement released by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), the Romans extracted gold from alluvial deposits in the Eastern Pyrenees. Using optically stimulated luminescence dating techniques, Oriol Olesti Vila of the UAB and Jorge Sanjurjo-Sánchez of the University of A Coruña dated two samples of fill from the remains of an ancient hydraulic structure on the Segre River to the third and fourth centuries A.D. The researchers explained that Roman miners would have eroded gold deposits from the riverbanks with water, and then washed them, either by channeling water through the sediments or flooding the sediments with...

Explanation: Are lasers from giant telescopes being used to defend the Earth? No. Lasers shot from telescopes are now commonly used to help increase the accuracy of astronomical observations. In some directions, Earth atmosphere-induced fluctuations in starlight can indicate how the air mass over a telescope is changing, but in other directions, no bright star exists. In these directions, astronomers can create an artificial star with a laser. Subsequent observations of the artificial laser guide star can reveal information so detailed about the changing blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere that much of it can be removed by rapidly flexing...

Gov. Hochul has spent much of her 4 ¹/₂ years in office facing a time bomb left by her predecessor: drastic, legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets that the state has no practical means of meeting. The 2019 Climate Act requires New York to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about one-quarter from that year’s levels by 2030. The state has made little progress toward this goal, in part because officials shuttered New York’s largest nuclear power plant in 2021. The law remains on the books, and its defenders balk at revision. If Hochul can’t persuade them to change it, Albany’s...

James Edwards, chief cashier for Leeds Transport Company in the 1950s, put aside any fake or foreign coins he found when gathering fares from the city's bus and tram drivers, before passing them to his grandson Peter.Peter, now 77, kept the coins safe for more than 70 years and has now discovered one of the collection is so old that Jesus hadn't even been born when it was minted.He found that the small coin was made in the 1st Century BC by the Carthaginians, an ancient Mediterranean civilisation with Phoenician roots, in Cádiz, Spain.On one side it bears the face...

Explanation: What's going on inside the head of this nebula? Dubbed the Exposed Cranium Nebula for its similarity to the human brain, what created the nebula remains a mystery. One thought is that the Cranium Nebula, also known as PMR 1, is a planetary nebula surrounding a white dwarf star. In this mode, the outer atmosphere was expelled when the original Sun-like star ran out of central nuclear fuel and contracted. A competing thought is that the central star is much more massive, possibly a Wolf-Rayet star, that is ejecting gas and dust via turbulent stellar winds. Adding to the...