Science

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, and Stony Brook University in New York, led by Prof Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum in London, unveiled a new dinosaur species discovered in Zimbabwe. The herbivorous dinosaur, named Musankwa sanyatiensis, […]

A last-minute technical problem has delayed Nasa’s unprecedented flight to the sun. The launch was pushed back after several delays from a technical glitch on the rocket carrying the probe, United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy rocket, caused NASA to run out the clock on its 65-minute launch window Saturday. “Teams worked very hard this […]

The decline of large predators and other “apex consumers” at the top of the food chain has disrupted ecosystems all over the planet, according to a review of recent findings conducted by an international team of scientists and published in the July 15 issue of Science. The study looked at research on a wide range […]

A new study combining data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory has turned up a surprise. Most of the huge black holes in the centres of galaxies in the past 11 billion years were not turned on by mergers between galaxies, as had been […]

Social studies of Facebook and Twitter have been adapted to gain a greater understanding of the swarming behaviour of locusts. The enormous success of social networking sites has vividly illustrated the importance of networking for humans; however for some animals, keeping informed about others of their kind is even more important. In a study published […]

The majority of ‘elliptical’ galaxies are not spherical but disc-shaped, resembling spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way with the gas and dust removed, new observations suggest. The results come from Atlas3D, a survey of all 260 early-type (‘elliptical’ and ‘lenticular’) galaxies in a well-defined volume of the nearby universe. Atlas3D shows a much […]

Tropical lizards may be slow. But they aren’t dumb. They can do problem-solving tasks just as well as birds and mammals, a new study shows. A Duke University experiment tested Puerto Rican anoles on several cognitive tasks and found they can learn and remember to solve a problem they’ve never faced before. The results challenge […]