“With a lethal combination of bone-crunching bite forces, stereoscopic vision, rapid growth rates, and colossal size, tyrant dinosaurs reigned uncontested for 15 million years leading up to the end-Cretaceous extinction—but it wasn’t always that way,” says Lindsay Zanno, paleontologist at North Carolina State University, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Sciences. “Early in their evolution, tyrannosaurs hunted in the shadows of archaic lineages such as allosaurs that were already established at the top of the food chain.”
“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who helped develop the simulation. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”
By the end of this century, says astrophysicist Martin Rees, we should be able to ask whether or not we live in a multiverse, and how much variety of the laws of physics its constituent ‘universes’ display. The answer to this question, says Rees, “will determine how we should interpret the ‘biofriendly’ universe in which we live (sharing it with any aliens with whom we might one day make contact).”
“The moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere,” says Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute, lead author of a paper presenting the discovery. “We were not aware of it until we dusted off observations made over two decades ago by the SOHO spacecraft.”
Humanity may not have to wait much longer to get our first evidence of E.T., NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said recently at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory headquarters. Bridenstine isn’t the only NASA leader to express optimism about the alien-life hunt. In 2015, Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist from 2013 to 2016, who predicted that NASA would find “proof of alien life in 20 years.”
“If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But there’s more,” explained Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist with SISSA and a dark matter expert. “We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Salucci is among the authors of the paper published in Annals of Physics.
“When we first saw Ryugu last June we were very surprised, because the shape is a spinning top and we never imagined that. Our next surprise was that the surface of the asteroid is covered by lots of boulders and rocks,” says Makoto Yoshikawa, a world-famous leader in celestial mechanics and Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission manager. “Maybe the next surprise will be the sample. If we find organic matter in it, this is the material that would eventually become life on earth. We want to find that original material.”
Astronomers have recently discovered that the expanse of space-time within range of our telescopes—‘the universe’—is only a tiny fraction of the aftermath of the Big Bang. In a new, mind-boggling project, an international team of astronomers have mapped 300,000 previously unknown objects using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope, almost all of which are galaxies in the distant universe; their radio signals traveling billions of light years to reach Earth.