OMG science

OMG science

“This fluid connection is evidence that the fault boundary of the Kafue Rift is active. 'Therefore, the Southwest African Rift Zone is too - and may be an early indication of the break-up of sub-Saharan Africa.'”

Around 66 million years ago, a six-mile (10km)-wide space rock called Chicxulub smashed into Mexico. The impact famously wiped out the dinosaurs, caused worldwide devastation and changed the course of history. The collision released a huge dust and soot cloud that partially blocked out the sun and caused temperatures to plummet - and in the years that followed, it wiped out more than 50 per cent of all animal and plant species on Earth.

Back in 2003, when he was at Oxford, Bostrom penned an influential philosophical paper with the incredible title of “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Loosely speaking, his argument was that sufficiently advanced civilizations will eventually build sophisticated simulations of their own ancestors - and that, given enough time in the simulation, those simulated beings will develop their own simulation inside the simulation, where a new set of simulated ancestors will do the same thing, ad infinitum.

The special sky colourings, caused by solar particles colliding with Earth's magnetic field, could be more visible than usual in the UK this week, according to experts, thanks to a recent powerful blast from the Sun.

During the expedition's first ten days, the ship navigated a strong storm, with ocean swells reaching two to three metres. Still, the sights were remarkable. "Lot of good remote birds!" the scientist texted friends. Then one of them sent him a link to a news story about an outbreak of a hantavirus, a potentially deadly pathogen traditionally carried by rodents, which had been reported on a cruise ship. "Please tell me you're not on this ship," the friend wrote.

Scientists called it trinitite. Now researchers have identified a new material within trinitite called a clathratea cagelike chemical lattice that traps other atoms inside it. It's a completely new kind of clathrate crystal—something never seen before in nature or in the products of a nuclear explosion, says Luca Bindi, a geologist at the University of Florence in Italy, who is co-author of a new study detailing the finding.

Experts have discovered foetuses 'catch' yawns from their mothers and have been seen slowly opening and closing their mouths. As part of a study, they recorded the facial expressions of pregnant women while an ultrasound machine captured real-time images of their foetuses' faces. By comparing the two records, the researchers found that foetuses were more likely to yawn after their mothers did, with a delay of around 90 seconds.

However, when it comes to the objects beyond Saturn, including the Uranian and Neptunian systems, as well as everything that lies in the Kuiper belt and beyond, the only probes we've ever sent their way are Voyager 2, which flew by Uranus and Neptune in the late 1980s, and New Horizons, which flew past Pluto in 2015.

The clip, filmed in 1978 for the landmark BBC series Life on Earth: A Natural History, demonstrates what has become Attenborough's trademark over his 70-year career: the communication of new, surprising and complex phenomena by showing rather than telling. There's no lecture here - just curiosity, mischief and arresting visual impact.

Many books describe how the first atomic bomb was built. But this history by Emily Seyl stands apart. It tells the story of the bomb's Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945 through restored photographs from the Los Alamos National Laboratory's National Security Research Center, where Seyl works. These include images of once-clandestine documents and experiments, as well as unfamiliar restored photographs of 'trinitite' - green glass found at the test crater - which fell from the bomb's fireball in molten drops.

The tsunami was triggered by a landslide, which was ultimately a result of climate change, according to researchers from UCL.

Experts from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia Climate School will respond to public inquiries with clear, evidence-based answers on various climate-related topics.

The new sensors, measuring either 200 or 500 nanometers across, are significantly smaller than a human red blood cell, allowing for precise temperature measurements at the cellular level.

"If implemented, upwards of 53 science missions would be terminated, nearly half of NASA's entire science fleet. Thousands of jobs would be lost, billions of dollars of taxpayer investments would be wasted, and more than a dozen international partnerships would be broken."