Science

Researchers have found that many small galaxies throughout the universe do not ‘swarm’ around larger ones like bees do but ‘dance’ in orderly disc-shaped orbits, challenging our understanding of how the universe formed and evolved. The finding has been published in Nature Communications. Read More »

Some seals know which way the wind blows when it comes to finding foraging grounds. A new study shows that certain harbor seals are drawn to offshore wind farms in waters off the U.K. and German coasts — a phenomenon that could have long-term implications for ocean ecosystems. Read More »

A team of researchers led by Xiang Zhang, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has created a lasing plasmon explosives-sniffing nanosensor that is free of metal losses and operates at a scale far below the diffraction limit for visible light.1 The sensor consists of a layer of the semiconductor cadmium sulfide on top of a silver ... Read More »

A few short decades ago, the gray seals were almost completely wiped out of New England waters. But over the years, their population has grown immensely, so much so that people in the area are calling for controlled hunts. Read More »

Newfoundland’s healthy honeybees are of increasing interest for scientists in the race to understand why colonies around the world are struggling. Dave Jennings of the provincial natural resources department says the island is one of the few places left on the planet free of rampant bee parasites. Read More »

Meteor reports stream in after a huge fireball is sighted in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Reports came in fast and furious to the American Meteor Society’s “Fireball Page,” which tracks citizen sightings of meteors. Many of the reports read like this one from Peter in Chester: “It was the brightest I’ve ever seen. I even heard a ... Read More »

The world is getting warmer, as greenhouse gases reach historic highs and Arctic sea ice melts, making 2013 one of the hottest years on record, international scientists said on Thursday. The annual State of the Climate report 2013 is a review of scientific data and weather events over the past year, compiled by 425 scientists from 57 countries. Read More »

For the first time in 50 years, a nesting bald eagle pair was spotted on San Clemente Island, one of the islands in the Channel Islands chain off the coast of California. The sighting means that bald eagles have now returned to five out of the eight islands, a forward progress that has conservationists cheering after decades of recovery efforts. Read More »

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity recently discovered its very first meteorite on the Red Planet, and it wasn’t a small one at all. The meteorite has been dubbed “Lebanon” by scientists, and is nearly 7 freet wide and is made of iron. Curiosity snapped images of the newly discovered meteorite, which also show a smaller meteorite nearby which has since been ... Read More »

A 16-metre southern right whale, which has enthralled watchers off Sydney’s beaches this week, has given birth to a ‘big bouncing baby’ and is spending the night with her newborn calf in Sydney harbour. Read More »

Nasa has outlined the agency’s next moves towards finding life beyond Earth, an ongoing journey that involves a number of current and future telescopes. Speaking at a public talk held at Nasa headquarters in Washington, experts from the space agency and its partner institutions added that finding intelligence outside our planet is within reach. Read More »