Mar 18th, 2026 - A prehistoric plant distills water so intensely it looks it came from space. Researchers at the University of New Mexico have discovered that a common, prehistoric plant distills water to such an extreme degree that its chemical signature resembles that of meteorites. Led by Earth and Planetary Sciences Professor Zachary Sharp, the team investigated the smooth horsetail, formally known as Equisetum laevigatum . This peculiar, hollow-stemmed plant belongs to a lineage that has thrived on our planet since the Devonian period, roughly 400 million years ago. As water travels up the plant's ... [Read More]

Mar 18th, 2026 - Chinese visitors to Japan tumbled 45.2 percent in February from a year earlier, official data showed Wednesday, as the fallout from the countries' diplomatic spat bit for the third month running. Previously Chinese travellers were the biggest source of tourists to Japan, contributing to a tourism boom in the land of cherry blossoms and Mount Fuji that was fuelled by a weak yen making shopping cheap. But in January, South Korea overtook China as the largest contingent and in February they were also the biggest source, with visitors from the country jumping 28.2 percent to 1.1 million. That ... [Read More]

Mar 17th, 2026 - Gilles Brassard and Charles Bennett have been awarded the A. M. Turing Award "for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing". The two will share the US$1-million prize, the Association for Computing Machinery in New York City announced on 18 March. The two winners have seemingly unrelated research backgrounds: Brassard is a computer scientist at the University of Montreal in Canada, and Bennett is a physicist at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights in New York. This is the first time that the Turing ... [Read More]

Mar 17th, 2026 - ROME (AP) — The Colosseum has a bright new look following a restoration using the same travertine marble of ancient Rome to recreate parts of columns from 2,000 years ago. Thousands of Romans once flocked to this arena to watch gladiators battle each other and wild animals. The structure still captures the public's imagination; it is Italy's most popular tourist destination, with 9 million visitors in 2025 alone. The project focused on a semicircular piazza outside the arena, where Roman spectators crowded under two arcades comprised of marble columns stretching up to 50 meters (164 ... [Read More]

Mar 17th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google When a black hole and a neutron star spiral toward collision, theory predicts that their orbit should become almost perfectly circular before the final impact. Gravitational waves steadily drain energy from the system, tightening the orbit and smoothing out any stretched shape along the way. By the time the objects finally merge, astronomers usually expect to see a clean circular path. But one recent event broke that pattern. In the gravitational-wave signal GW200105, scientists at the University of Birmingham detected a neutron star and black hole spiraling together ... [Read More]

Mar 17th, 2026 - You are not logged into your account. You have a registered email address and password on pressherald.com, but we are unable to locate a paid subscription attached to these credentials. Please Thank you for your support of local journalism!  song discovered on decades-old audio equipment could open up a new understanding of how the huge animals communicate, according to researchers who say it's the oldest such recording known. , a marine giant beloved by whale watchers for its docile nature and spectacular leaps from the water, and was recorded by scientists in March 1949 in Bermuda, ... [Read More]

Mar 17th, 2026 - The Large Hadron Collider has discovered a new particle, the 80th identified so far by the world's most powerful particle smasher, Europe's CERN physics laboratory announced Tuesday. The new particle has been named "Xi-cc-plus".  Scientists hope the particle — which is similar to a proton but four times heavier — will reveal more about the strange behaviour of quantum mechanics. All the matter around us — including the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of atoms — are made of baryons.  These common particles are composed of three quarks, which ... [Read More]

Mar 17th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google If you picture a juvenile blue crab's biggest problem as avoiding hungry fish, a new study suggests you're missing the real threat. In the mid-salinity parts of Chesapeake Bay – where many young crabs gather as they grow – the main predator isn't striped bass or anything else with fins. It's bigger blue crabs. A long-running field study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center ( SERC ) found that cannibalism was essentially the only source of predation the researchers detected on juvenile blue crabs in a mid-salinity tributary. The good news is ... [Read More]