Huge galaxies grow by eating nearby smaller ones
Massive galaxies in the Universe have stopped making their own stars and are instead snacking on nearby galaxies, according to research by…
Category: Big Questions
Individual human microbe community linked to education and gender
As scientists catalog the trillions of bacteria found in every nook and cranny of the human body, a new look by the University of Michigan…
Clear skies and water detected in Neptune-sized exoplanet
Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope have discovered…
Colonization of new land drives the evolution of new hummingbird species
The first comprehensive map of hummingbirds’ 22-million-year-old family tree — reconstructed based on careful analysis of 284 of…
Diversity of lake cichlid species due to unusually high gene duplication
In an effort to understand the molecular basis of adaptation in vertebrates, researchers sequenced the genomes and transcriptomes of five…
Sloths may be slow but their body size evolved really fast
Today’s sloths might be known as slow, small animals, but their ancestors developed large body sizes at an amazing rate, according to…
Deciduous trees flourished after dinosaur-killing meteor impact
Some 66 million years ago, a 10-km diameter chunk of rock hit the Yukatan peninsula near the site of the small town of Chicxulub with the…
Origin of vertebrate notochord seriously much older than previously thought
Thoughts of the family tree may not be uppermost in the mind of a person suffering from a slipped disc, but those spinal discs provide a…
Oxygen alone may not be enough to detect life on exoplanets
Astronomers searching the atmospheres of alien worlds or exoplants for gases that might be produced by life can’t rely on the…
Milky Way belongs to supercluster of galaxies named Laniakea
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) — among other telescopes — have determined…