Apr 24th, 2024 - Japan's first moon lander has survived a third freezing lunar night, Japan's space agency said Wednesday after receiving an image from the device three months after it landed on the moon. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said the lunar probe responded to a signal from the earth Tuesday night, confirming it has survived another weekslong lunar night. Temperatures can fall to minus 170 degrees Celsius (minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit) during a lunar night, and rise to around 100 Celsius (212 Fahrenheit) during a lunar day. The probe, Smart Lander for Investing Moon, or SLIM, reached the ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - In an otherwise relatively normal-looking field of eastern China's Anhui Province sits a large mound. When covered with grass and trees, the mound looks quite natural. But, when archaeologists began digging, they quickly realized this wasn't a normal hill. It was a massive 2,200-year-old tomb filled with treasure. Archaeologists spent the past four years excavating the mound outside Huainan , the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said in an April 17 news release. The gigantic burial complex — dubbed Wuwangdun — spans just over 16 million square ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - For the first time since November 2023, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has started transmitting useful data back to Earth about the status and functionality of its onboard systems.  The mission team is now preparing for the spacecraft to resume sending back scientific data. Voyager 1, along with its sibling Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to venture into interstellar space . Malfunction in Voyager's computers Voyager 1 had ceased transmitting intelligible science and engineering data on November 14, 2023. Although the spacecraft appeared to be receiving instructions and operating as ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - Some 540 million years ago, an ancient group of corals developed the ability to make its own light 1 . Scientists have previously found that bioluminescence is an ancient trait — with one group of tiny crustaceans first making their own light an estimated 267 million years ago. But this new finding pushes back the origins of bioluminescence even further by around 270 million years. "We had no idea it was going to be this old," says Danielle DeLeo, an evolutionary marine biologist at Florida International University in Miami, who led the study, which was published on 24 April in ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - Most people know about the Huns , if only because of their infamous warrior-ruler Attila. But the Avars, another nomadic people who subsequently occupied roughly the same region of eastern and central Europe, have remained obscure despite having assembled a sprawling empire that lasted from the late sixth century to the early ninth century. Even archaeologists have struggled to piece together their history and culture, relying on spotty and potentially biased contemporaneous chronicles that, in many cases, were authored by the Avars' adversaries. A deep dive into 424 genomes collected from ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - – Many animals can glow in the dark. Fireflies famously blink on summer evenings. But most animals that light up are found in the depths of the ocean . In a new study, scientists report that deep-sea corals that lived 540 million years ago may have been the first animals to glow, far earlier than previously thought. "Light signaling is one of the earliest forms of communication that we know of — it's very important in deep waters," said Andrea Quattrini, a co-author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Some use light to startle ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - Astronomers have found some hot magnetized gas swirling around our galaxy's center. Something is alight in Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy . In a multi-institutional study, astronomers have created the first three-dimensional visualization of a high-energy flare from Sgr A*. This accomplishment, achieved using data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), provides distinctive insights into the turbulent surroundings of black holes. "This is the first three-dimensional reconstruction of gas rotating close ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - A new study resets the timing for the emergence of bioluminescence back to millions of years earlier than previously thought. Bioluminescence is used throughout the animal kingdom, particularly in marine environments, to lure prey, startle predators and even act as camouflage in the surrounding light . "We always say it's light-limited in the deep sea, but there are a lot of organisms that produce their own light," said Andrea Quattrini , a zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The dazzling glow of bioluminescence is common in Octocorallia, also known ... [Read More]