The newly-discovered isotope, plutonium-227, has a half-life of 0.78 seconds, according to a team of physicists from China. “The magic numbers of protons and neutrons, such as 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, ...

In a new study, astronomers compared high-resolution images of Uranus from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to the more-distant view from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Their results may serve as ...

The venom of black widow spiders contains a cocktail of seven specific latrotoxins, but only one — α-latrotoxin — targets vertebrates, including humans. Chemists at the University of Münster have now ...

New research by paleontologists from the University of Leicester, the University of Birmingham and Liverpool John Moores University demonstrates an unexpectedly high degree of variation in the hands ...

A team of marine biologists led by a Florida International University researcher has described a new species of the shark genus Sphyrna from the Caribbean and the Southwest Atlantic. Named for the ...

Fungus-farming ants cultivate multiple species of fungi for food, but the history of fungus-ant co-evolution is poorly known. In a new study published this week in the journal Science, researchers ...

Centaurs are former trans-Neptunian objects that have been moved inside Neptune’s orbit by subtle gravitational influences of the planets in the last few million years, and may eventually become short ...

Prior studies found signs of ice in the permanently shadowed regions near the south pole of the Moon, including areas within Cabeus, Haworth, Shoemaker and Faustini craters. A new analysis of data ...

The Moon may have been captured during a close encounter between a young Earth and a terrestrial binary (a system of the Moon and another rocky object), according to a new paper published in the ...

In August 2024, ESA’s JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer (JUICE) made history with a daring Moon-Earth flyby and double gravity assist maneuver. As the spacecraft zipped past our Moon and home planet, NASA’s ...

Recent studies suggest that a muscle called the levator anguli oculi medialis (LAOM) is unique to dogs (Canis familiaris) and evolved due to domestication. This muscle raises the inner eyebrows, ...

The new image of the Rosette Nebula was taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on NSF’s Víctor M. Blanco 4-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of ...