Most of North America’s megafauna — mastodons, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cats and American camels and horses — disappeared close to 13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene period. The cause of this massive extinction has long been debated by scientists who, until recently, could only speculate as to why. A …
Early growth of giant galaxy, just 3 billion years after the Big Bang, revealed
Astronomers have for the first time gotten a glimpse of the earliest stages of massive galaxy construction. The building site, dubbed “Sparky,” is a developing galaxy containing a dense core that is blazing with the light of millions of newborn stars which are forming at a ferocious rate. The discovery was made possible through combining …
Scientists grow an organ in an animal from cells created in lab
Laboratory-grown replacement organs have moved a step closer with the completion of a new study. Scientists have grown a fully functional organ from transplanted laboratory-created cells in a living animal for the first time. The researchers have created a thymus — an organ next to the heart that produces immune cells known as T …
A NEW PLANET
An international team of astronomers has discovered a planet slightly larger than Jupiter that orbits a star 500 light years from Earth. A super-duper telescope was not even required; they found the planet using several small telescopes much like those used by amateur astronomers. The new planet is named TrES-2 because it is the second …
China’s Wall Less Great In View from Space
It has become a space-based myth. The Great Wall of China, frequently billed as the only man-made object visible from space, generally isn’t, at least to the unaided eye in low Earth orbit. It certainly isn’t visible from the Moon. You can, though, see a lot of other results of human activity. The visible wall …