Black holes are speed eaters, usually scarfing down a star in less than a year. But a supermassive black hole in a galaxy about 1.8 billion light-years away has been gorging on a single star for more than 10 years – longer than any other observed supermassive black hole meal. Astronomers detected the extraordinary feast […]

Nomadic herders took the ancient Silk Road to new heights. Starting 4,000 years ago or more, Central Asian herders routinely migrated from highland pastures in summer to lowland areas in winter (SN: 5/3/14, p. 15). Over roughly the next 2,000 years, those routes through mountainous regions eventually became a key part of the Silk Road, […]

Spend an hour wandering along a river and you may wonder why the water rushing by chose this particular path over any other. While many nature writers might offer philosophical musings on the subject, Where the River Flows author Sean Fleming has physics on his side. Physics isn’t the lens through which most people think […]

Arctic sea ice has hit a record low for the third year in a row. It’s the paltriest maximum extent seen since recordkeeping began in 1979, scientists at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced March 22. Total sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean peaked on March 7, satellite observations show, […]

Behind their ferocious façade, tyrannosaurs were probably a bit touchy-feely. A new species of tyrannosaur may have had highly sensitive organs in its face that could detect touch and temperature, researchers report March 30 in Scientific Reports. Several skulls of the newly identified species, Daspletosaurus horneri, which lived about 75 million years ago and grew […]

A hefty red, dead galaxy in the early universe appears to have bulked up a bit too fast. The galaxy, seen as it was when the universe was only 1.65 billion years old, weighs at least three times as much as the Milky Way, but has stopped making stars. Other galaxies at the time tend […]

Blame physics — not kindergarten-level clumsiness — for perpetually untied shoelaces. The combined forces from legs swinging and feet pounding the pavement create a perfect lace-loosening storm, scientists report April 12 in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Mechanical engineer Oliver O’Reilly of the University of California, Berkeley was familiar with the infuriating phenomenon of […]

While researching fossils in a museum in 2007, Sterling Nesbitt noticed one partial skeleton that was hard to place. Though the reptile — at the time, unofficially called Teleocrater rhadinus — was thought to be a dinosaur relative, it was an oddball. At about 2 meters long, it was larger than other close relatives, walked […]

Cassini is bravely going where no spacecraft has gone before — between Saturn and its rings. The probe, which launched in 1997 and has orbited Saturn since 2004, starts this daring expedition April 22. It will fly through the 2,400-kilometer-wide gap between Saturn and its rings 22 times before plunging into the planet’s atmosphere and […]

The New World was a surprisingly old destination for humans or our evolutionary relatives, say investigators of a controversial set of bones and stones. An unidentified Homo species used stone tools to crack apart mastodon bones, teeth and tusks approximately 130,700 years ago at a site near what’s now San Diego. This unsettling claim upending […]