Science

In an extraordinary find, scientists have discovered ancient giant sperm – thought to have been longer than the crustacean male’s entire body – at a world heritage fossil site in Australia. Tightly coiled up inside the sexual organs of the fossilised freshwater crustaceans known as ostracods, these preserved giant sperm are from tiny shrimps that lived at least 17 million …

The video that launched astronaut Chris Hadfield into stardom is being taken off YouTube today. Hadfield’s cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” has been viewed more than 22-million times since it was posted May 12, 2013.

An amazing new NASA video shows two super-dense neutron stars tearing each other apart in a cataclysmic cosmic merger that ultimately forms a black hole. The neutron star collision video, which was produced by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, is a supercomputer simulation. It starts off with two neutron stars — the city-size, dense remnants of a violent …

Whale researchers had an extra happy Mother’s Day on news that the world’s oldest known orca has survived another year. J2, also known as “Granny,” estimated by The Center for Whale Research to be 103 years old, was sighted Friday by Pacific Whale Watch Association crews.

The military must do more to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate, including updating war plans and building more ships to operate in the Arctic, a report by a group of retired military officers will say Wednesday. The report by CNA Corp., a nonprofit research group that frequently does work for the Navy, says the military must be …

OR-7, the wolf who captivated wildlife-loving Californians when he started wandering into California in 2011, has been spending time in the vicinity of a female wolf in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in southwestern Oregon this month, and data from his radio transmitter indicates the two may have denned there, according to an alert on the Oregon Department of Fish …

A robotic arm developed by Swiss researchers could be used to capture debris orbiting our planet, according to its creators. The bionic arm, which was developed by researchers at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, is capable of grasping flying objects with complex shapes and trajectories in less than five-hundredths of …

This month Saturn is closer to the Earth then it will be all year, making it appear particularly bright in the night sky, Slate reports. But even at its closest, the ringed planet is 830 million miles away, rendering it just a dot to the unaided eye. How would the giant gas planet, nine times wider than our own, appear …

The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable because we have “passed the point of no return”, scientists have warned. Researchers at Nasa and the University of California, Irvine, said that the ice sheet will have melted and flowed into the ocean within the next few centuries. The study, which is due to appear in the journal …

On Saturday, May 10, 2014, at 2 p.m. local time (10 p.m. Friday EDT), the hybrid remotely operated vehicle Nereus was confirmed lost at 9,990 meters (6.2 miles) depth in the Kermadec Trench northeast of New Zealand. The unmanned vehicle was working as part of a mission to explore the ocean’s hadal region from 6,000 to nearly 11,000 meters deep. …

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District has issued its first Spare the Air alert of 2014, stating that the combination of high heat and low wind in Monday’s forecast is a recipe for unhealthy air. In such weather conditions, motor vehicle exhaust accumulates, creating unhealthy levels of ozone pollution. The Air District asks commuters to avoid driving and use …