« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 05:56:16 pm »
Popular Science Deep sea mining test uncovered multiple new species Andrew Paul Fri, December 5, 2025 at 3:34 PM EST 3 min read
This sea spider is related to land spiders but does not belong to that group. They can grow to the size of a palm in the deep sea around Antarctica, but this particular species is only a few millimeters in size.
Researchers completing one of the largest impact studies on the potential environmental impacts of deep-sea mining found a bit more than they bargained for on the ocean floor: 4,350 animals, each at least larger than 0.3 millimeters. From these, they ultimately identified 788 separate species of unique crustaceans, mollusks, marine bristle worms, and other creatures living in this sought after mining zone.
While the team found that harvesting rare earth metals from over 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface may not be quite as destructive as initially theorized, the disruptions are still cause for serious concerns. The team’s findings are published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Despite being one of the most inhospitable environments for humans on the planet, there is a rapidly growing commercial interest in the deepest parts of the ocean. Unfortunately, this fascination is frequently less about conservation and more about profits. That’s because some of the planet’s largest deposits of rare earth metals are located on the seafloor, which makes them an increasingly attractive target for companies.
One of the most attractive targets for deep sea mining advocates is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a continent-sized abyssal plain located at a depth of around 2.5 miles between Hawaii and Mexico. In addition to being rich in minerals, the CCZ is also one of the world’s least understood habitats. In 2022, marine biologists announced the discovery of over 5,000 new species catalogued during a research excursion to the area.
The nodules are densely packed on the seabed in the survey area. Here, an underwater robot taking a sample of a deep-sea sponge animal with a starfish. Credit: ROV Odysseus, Pelagic Research Services
With so much biodiversity left to explore, conservationists have repeatedly voiced worries about the environmental impacts of deep sea mining on regions like the CCZ. However, there is barely any research into the topic.
“Critical metals are needed for our green transition and they are in short supply,” Thomas Dahlgren, a marine biologist at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and study coauthor, said in a statement. “Several of these metals are found in large quantities on the deep-sea floor, but until now, no one has shown how they can be extracted or what environmental impact this would have.”
To learn more about the possible effects, Dahlgren and his teammates surveyed a nearly 50-mile stretch of the CCZ two years before it was slated to receive a test run from a deep sea mineral mining vehicle. They then returned two months after the collector for a total of 160 days of fieldwork, having spotted the over 4,000 organisms living there, including those 788 separate species of mollusks, crustaceans, marine bristle worms, and more.
“I have been working in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone for over 13 years, and this is by far the largest study that has been conducted,” Dahlgren explained. “Since most species have not been described previously, molecular (DNA) data was crucial in facilitating studies of biodiversity and ecology on the seabed.”
The researcher identified a new solitaire coral attached to polymetallic nodules. It was named Deltocyathus zoemetallicus. Credit: Natural History Museum of London / University of Gothenburg
The mining test’s effects were stark: within the machine’s tracks, the team calculated a 37 percent decrease in total animal population along with 32 percent decrease in diversity.
“Deep-sea mining within the CCZ is at a critical juncture, as the industry looks to move beyond the exploration phase and into commercial exploitation,” the study’s authors wrote. “Consequently, there is a clear need for direct assessment of the impacts of mining on faunal abundance and biodiversity at the seafloor.”
With this first major project completed, marine biologists hope it can serve as a baseline for future analysis of deep sea mining impacts. Moving forward they hope to also investigate the 30 percent of the CCZ currently protected by environmental regulations.
“At present, we have virtually no idea what lives there,” added Natural History Museum of London researcher and study coauthor Adrian Glover.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 05:26:30 pm »
Space Scientists capture 51 images showing exoplanets coming together around other stars: 'This data set is an astronomical treasure' Samantha Mathewson Fri, December 5, 2025 at 2:00 PM EST 4 min read
A gallery of 51 debris disks captured by ESO's SPHERE instrument, visible from the starlight they reflect with the central star blocked out, reveals dusty rings and belts around young stars, offering a glimpse into the formation and evolution of distant planetary systems. | Credit: N. Engler et al./SPHERE Consortium/ESO
Astronomers have unveiled a stunning new gallery of dusty rings encircling young stars, revealing the intricate architecture of developing planetary systems.
Using observations from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope, astronomers documented 51 budding exoplanetary systems after studying 161 nearby stars, offering an unprecedented glimpse at debris disks around stars beyond our solar system. These debris disks are formed by collisions between asteroids or comets that generate large amounts of dust and resemble our own solar system where asteroids collect in the inner belt and comets populate the distant Kuiper Belt, according to a statement.
"This data set is an astronomical treasure," Gaël Chauvin, co-author of the study and SPHERE project scientist, said in the statement. "It provides exceptional insights into the properties of debris disks, and allows for deductions of smaller bodies like asteroids and comets in these systems, which are impossible to observe directly."
Scientists study debris disks because they offer a snapshot of what young solar systems look like after planets begin to form. Young stars form within collapsing clouds of gas and dust, which flatten into broad protoplanetary disks where material gradually clumps into larger bodies. As these systems mature, collisions between leftover asteroids and comets produce fine dust creating the debris disks we see today. By examining how this dust reflects starlight, astronomers can piece together how planets grow and how systems like our own take shape over time.
However, debris disks fade as collisions become less frequent and dust is gradually removed — either because it's blown out by stellar radiation, swept up by planets or remaining planetesimals or has fallen into the central star. Our solar system is an example of the end state of this process, with just the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt and faint zodiacal dust remaining.
Using advanced instruments like SPHERE allows astronomers to study the dust in younger systems — roughly the first 50 million years — that can still be detected. Most importantly, SPHERE blocks starlight using a coronagraph, a small disk that physically masks the star to reveal faint surrounding objects. The telescope's adaptive optics system corrects for atmospheric distortions in real time, and optional polarization filters enhance sensitivity to light reflected by dust, making debris disks easier to detect.
The new survey reveals remarkable variety, from narrow rings to wide diffuse belts, lopsided disks and disks viewed both edge-on and face-on. In fact, four of the disks were imaged in this detail for the first time, the researchers said.
Striking views of HD 197481 and HD 39060 capture sharp streams of material darting out from either side of its central star (representing an edge-on view), while incredible views of systems like HD 109573 and 181327 capture a nearly perfect circular debris ring (representing a face-on view).
In many systems, dust congregates in sharply defined rings, hinting at unseen planets shaping the debris, much like Neptune molds the Kuiper Belt in our solar system. On the other hand, the dust distribution in younger systems like HD 145560 and HD 156623 is more chaotic and billowy, where less defined structures suggest material hasn't yet been fully sculpted by planets or cleared by collisions.
Comparing the different structures within the disks revealed clear trends, like more massive stars tend to host more massive disks, and disks with material concentrated farther from the star also generally contain more mass, according to the statement.
"All of these belt structures appear to be associated with the presence of planets, specifically of giant planets, clearing their neighborhoods of smaller bodies," researchers said in the statement. "In some of the SPHERE images, features like sharp inner edges or disk asymmetries give tantalizing hints of as-yet unobserved planets."
While some giant exoplanets have already been detected in these systems, the SPHERE survey offers a guide post for new targets to be studied in greater detail by instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and ESO's Extremely Large Telescope, which could reveal the exoplanets responsible for sculpting these spectacular disks.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 05:19:47 pm »
ScienceAlert Complex Life May Be a Billion Years Older Than We Thought Michelle Starr Fri, December 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM EST 4 min read
Illustration of a human cell, with colorful organelles, on a black background
The origins of complex, nucleated cellular life – everything from amoebas to humans – may date back a lot further in Earth's history than we thought.
A new study tracing the earliest steps toward complex life suggests that this transformation from simpler ancestors began almost 3 billion years ago – long before our planet had the oxygen levels needed to support a thriving eukaryotic biosphere.
That's almost a billion years earlier than some estimates place the rise of complex cells, pointing to a surprisingly long, drawn-out evolutionary buildup rather than a rapid leap in complexity.
There are many ways to group life on Earth, but possibly the most basal distinction is between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
Prokaryotes, a group that includes bacteria and archaea, were the first life to emerge on Earth around 4 billion years ago. Prokaryotes are relatively simple, essentially consisting of a cell membrane, some rugged proteins, and free-floating DNA.
Eukaryotes, by contrast, came later and are a lot more complex, with nuclei, organelles, delicate internal membranes, and larger, more structured genomes.
How much later, and the order in which these components developed, has been something of an open question for a very long time. One of the biggest unknowns is where mitochondria fit in the timeline – the so-called "powerhouses" of the cell that help convert the energy in glucose into a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to power cellular processes.
Scientists think that mitochondria started as a free-living bacterium that took up residence inside another cell and eventually fused with it. The timing of this merger matters – whether the mitochondria came first and triggered the rest of the changes towards complexity, or whether complexity started first and the mitochondria came along later.
To figure this out, a team led by paleobiologist Christopher Kay of the University of Bristol in the UK carried out a molecular clock analysis of genes from a wide range of organisms.
"The approach was two-fold: by collecting sequence data from hundreds of species and combining this with known fossil evidence, we were able to create a time-resolved tree of life," says computational evolutionary biologist Tom Williams of the University of Bath in the UK.
"We could then apply this framework to better resolve the timing of historical events within individual gene families."
A molecular clock is a method that allows scientists to estimate when organisms diverged and when traits first emerged. Basically, all lifeforms on the planet have a few things in common, such as the universal genetic code, an almost-universal set of amino acids, and a universal reliance on ATP for energy.
Scientists can estimate the rate at which mutations occur in a specific DNA sequence, compare the same sequence in multiple species, and work backwards to estimate when those species last shared an ancestor. They can also use a molecular clock to figure out when traits or gene functions first appeared.
By focusing on the differences between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, the researchers used genes from hundreds of organisms to reconstruct a timeline of the order in which eukaryotic traits emerged. They call their model CALM, an acronym for Complex Archaeon, Late Mitochondrion.
The team's timeline of the evolution of eukaryotes. (Dr Christopher Kay)
Astonishingly, some of the first genetic signatures appeared about 2.9 to 3 billion years ago, with the first detectable steps towards actin and tubulin proteins, a simple cytoskeleton, and early features of a protonucleus.
This was followed by changes that would lead to cytoplasmic membranes, organelles called the Golgi apparatus, and a diversification of gene expression systems such as RNA polymerases.
The mitochondria came relatively late to the party – appearing around 2.2 billion years ago.
But that timing coincides with the time at which Earth's oxygen rapidly increased – suggesting that, even though eukaryotic life was well on its way before the Great Oxidation Event, it needed a little boost from environmental changes to get to where it is today.
"What sets this study apart is looking into detail about what these gene families actually do – and which proteins interact with which – all in absolute time," Kay says.
"It has required the combination of a number of disciplines to do this: paleontology to inform the timeline, phylogenetics to create faithful and useful trees, and molecular biology to give these gene families a context."
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 05:10:27 pm »
Scientific American Was the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ Really a Comet? A scientist has identified a possible astronomical explanation for the Star of Bethlehem, as described in the Bible Meghan Bartels Fri, December 5, 2025 at 1:10 PM EST 3 min read
Astronomers have long sought a cosmic explanation for the Bible’s Star of Bethlehem, the shining celestial object that, so the story goes, guided the wise men, or magi, from Jerusalem to greet the baby Jesus. One long-standing hypothesis held that the Star of Bethlehem was in fact a conjunction, perhaps between Jupiter and Saturn. But this holiday season, a scientist has presented a new contender: a comet.
Matney recalls how, as a student, he worked at a planetarium that ran a Christmas sky show telling the story of the Star of Bethlehem, which rose in the southern sky until it appeared to come to a stop overhead. The planetarium show said that no known astronomical object could act in the way described by the story of the magi—Earth’s rotation means that everything in the sky rises in the east and sets in the west.
“I remember sitting there saying, ‘Oh, I know one that could do that,’” Matney says. He suspected that a long-period comet from the mysterious Oort Cloud, which lies far beyond the planets of our solar system, could be the key.
If such a comet made an extremely close pass to Earth—about as close as the moon—it could create the strange appearance of a starlike object rising in the daylit sky and then appearing to stand still for a few hours. “A comet could stay in one place if it was basically on a ‘collision course’ with Earth,” Matney says. “That’s exactly what you would expect of an object that’s going to pass very, very close to the Earth.”
To test the idea, Matney turned to previous reports of Chinese records of a “broom star”—a term that has often been used to describe comets, in reference to their dynamic tail—that appeared in the spring of 5 B.C.E. The records have drawn the attention of Star of Bethlehem hunters for decades.
Intriguingly, the Chinese records seem to suggest that the strange star remained in the same constellation for 70 days—far too long for a comet, leading some astronomers to assume the object was perhaps a bright nova with a rayed appearance. Matney, meanwhile, says this description supports his collision-course-comet theory.
Other astronomers are less sanguine. Ralph Neuhäuser, an astrophysicist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, who also studies astronomy through history, says that the Chinese record may be misleading. “The older the record, in general, the less information is left,” he says. Other astronomers have also suggested the search for an explanation for the star is misguided at best.
Matney does not deny the limitations of the records, stressing that he would prefer to have more sources. He says his goal is not to identify the Star of Bethlehem outright so much as to propose a valid astronomical object that could match its described behavior.
“I’m sure this paper will not be the final word on the Star of Bethlehem, but it seems to be a worthy contribution to forensic astronomy,” says Frederick Walter, an astronomer at Stony Brook University.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 05:02:16 pm »
Space NASA spacecraft tracks comet SWAN in incredible 40-day timelapse — and even glimpses interstellar invader 3I/ATLAS (video) Sharmila Kuthunur Fri, December 5, 2025 at 3:00 PM EST 3 min read
Credit: NASA/Southwest Research Institute
Comets are famous for making brief, dramatic appearances in our skies, but one icy wanderer just received an unprecedented level of attention from one of NASA's newest spacecraft.
For nearly 40 days, NASA's PUNCH mission imaged the recently-discovered Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) every four minutes as it drifted through the inner solar system. That near-continuous stare "may be the longest any comet has been tracked" with such a frequency, according to a recent NASA announcement.
"Other comets have been tracked at once-per-day cadence for years," Craig DeForest, the principal investigator for the PUNCH mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in the statement. "What's new here is the few-minute cadence of observation."
Comet SWAN moving across the sky in PUNCH images taken from Sept. 11 to 22, 2025. | Credit: NASA/Southwest Research Institute
The video above stitches together hundreds of PUNCH images taken from Aug. 25 to Oct. 2, showing the comet gliding between two bright objects — Mars at the top and the star Spica in the constellation of Virgo at the bottom. Because the images were not fully processed before being combined, boundaries between individual snaps remain visible as thin black seams, the statement read.
Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) was first spotted in September by Ukrainian amateur astronomer Vladimir Bezugly, who noticed the icy visitor a bright blob close to the sun while scanning publicly available images from the sun-watching Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Just a day after its discovery, the comet reached perihelion, its closest point to the sun, passing at a distance of 46.74 million miles (75.20 million km) of our star.
Early images had revealed the comet’s bluish-green coma, created as the sun's heat vaporized the comet's ices in a process called sublimation. Gas and dust released were swept backward by the solar wind, forming the glowing tail captured in various images. By mid-September, the coma had taken on an unusual triangular "hammerhead" shape, a distortion astronomers often link to a fragmenting nucleus, as outgassing from multiple pieces can stretch a normally round coma into a lopsided form.
At the same time, Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) happened to share the same swath of sky with the now-famous interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS. In the PUNCH time-lapse below, 3I/ATLAS appears briefly near the end of the sequence, zipping left to right beneath SWAN.
As Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) moves leftward in the images, its tail is pushed in the same direction by the solar wind, making the comet appear to drift "backward," the NASA statement noted.
This processed movie shows comet SWAN moving across the sky in PUNCH images taken from Sept. 11 to 22, 2025. The two bright objects that the comet passes between (roughly halfway through the movie) are the planet Mars (top) and the star Spica (bottom). Comet 3I/ATLAS also makes a brief appearance, crossing from left to right below comet SWAN near the end of the video. | Credit: NASA/Southwest Research Institute
Comet tails act as natural tracers of the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles flowing outward from the sun and shaping the space environment throughout the solar system.
"Watching the sun's effects from multiple vantage points — and with different types of instruments — is what gives us a complete picture of the space environment," Gina DiBraccio, a heliophysicist and acting director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the same statement.
"We use these same tools to track and analyze how space weather impacts our astronauts, our spacecraft, and our technology here on Earth."
In late October, the comet made its closest approach to Earth at 25.10 million miles (40.38 million km), putting it on the cusp of naked-eye visibility and easily within reach of binoculars and small telescopes.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 04:56:52 pm »
BGR Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) Has Split Into Three Pieces Jason Dookeran Sun, December 7, 2025 at 10:17 AM EST 4 min read
Close up of comet C/2025 K1 ATLAS splitting into three fragments in space - F. Ferrigno/Inaf/Univ. Parthenope
Italian astronomers captured rare footage of Comet C/2025 K1 ATLAS tearing itself apart in real-time. The comet's October 8 solar pass vaporized subsurface ice, creating gas pressure that cracked the nucleus from the inside. This leads to an outcome even stranger than 3/I ATLAS's acceleration mystery. While the structural damage was done in October, the comet didn't visibly fragment until a month later when astronomers caught the breakup in progress. Using the 1.82m Copernicus telescope located in the Asiago Observatory, they recorded the comet's break up on November 11-12.
A release from the Italian Institute of National Astrophysics (translated) says that the pieces of the comet are around 1,250 miles (2,000 km) away from each other. That's roughly the distance from Chicago to Miami, except these fragments are chunks of 4.6-billion-year-old ice hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour.
The comet was discovered in May 2025 and steadily brightened as it approached the sun, but never became visible to the naked eye, unlike other comets. Astronomers suspected the close October pass would stress the comet's structure, making the November observations a priority for tracking potential changes. Astronomers captured the breakup evolving over 24 hours, showing how the fragments continued separating after the initial split.
A 4.5-billion-year-old time capsule
The C/2025 K1 ATLAS comet flying across the night sky past other stars - Dimitrios Katevainis/CC BY-SA 4.0
This comet is thought to have originated in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. While we don't know the comet's actual age, scientists believe it's roughly as old as the solar system itself — around 4.6 billion years. That ancient origin is what makes the breakup scientifically valuable. Getting information about the exterior of a comet, especially one this old, is useful, but it's even more important to get information about what's inside it. Comet surfaces get bombarded by solar radiation and cosmic rays for billions of years, altering their chemical composition.
Scientists have long studied how the solar system formed from its original ingredients. The breakup exposed interior material that's never been touched by solar radiation, giving researchers direct access to pristine samples from the solar system's formation. Analyzing the composition of freshly exposed material reveals what elements and compounds existed in the solar nebula. That's the cloud of gas and dust that eventually collapsed to form the sun, planets, and everything else orbiting today.
Researchers rarely get this kind of access since most comets either stay intact or fragment too far from Earth to study in detail. Italian astronomers happened to catch this one at the right distance with clear enough skies to capture the exposed interior material. Despite its breakup, this one, like other comets, is not a threat to life on our planet.
Capturing the split in real-time
Greyscale image showing the pieces of the C/2025 K1 ATLAS comet after its split - Gianluca Masi, Virtual Telescope Project
Italian astronomers at Asiago Observatory were tracking C/2025 K1 after its October solar pass when they caught it fragmenting on November 11-12. What they expected to be routine monitoring turned into documentation of a rare breakup event.
The telescope imagery shows two large, bright fragments and one smaller, dimmer piece trailing behind. Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project captured additional observations on November 12-13, documenting how the fragments continued separating. Clear skies with minimal atmospheric turbulence allowed them to capture fine detail on an object millions of miles away.
Comet breakups rarely happen in places they can be observed, either due to it happening too fast, or too far away to be seen with a high-resolution telescope. Multi-night observations allow researchers to study how the fragmentation progressed, not just see the final state. The 24-hour observation window revealed the fragments were actively drifting further apart, with the debris field continuing to expand as the fragments drifted apart. Spectroscopic analysis of the exposed interior material will reveal the comet's chemical composition, providing direct evidence of what existed in the early solar system.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 04:50:42 pm »
ABC News Here's where paleontologists found thousands of dinosaur tracks JULIA JACOBO Fri, December 5, 2025 at 3:28 PM EST 3 min read
Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty Images - PHOTO: Sauropods, theropods and ankylosaurus footprints from the Cretaceos period are seen at the Toro Toro National Park, where about 3.500 footprints were found turning the place into a new palaeontological attraction, in Bolivia on October 31, 2018.
Paleontologists have found tens of thousands of dinosaur tracks in South America, which offers evidence as to which species were traveling via an ancient coastline.
A total of nearly 18,000 tracks -- including 16,600 footprints as well as 1,378 swim tracks and several tail traces -- have been located along the Carreras Pampa track site, an ancient coastline located in Torotoro National Park in central Bolivia, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday.
The ripple marks extend in a northwest-southeast direction, which probably indicate how the dinosaurs and other animals moved along the paleocoastline, according to the paper.
Most of the tracks belong to theropods -- a clade of dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period known for their bipedal mode of walking that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex, according to the study. Some of the preserved tracks, estimated to have been created between 145 million and 66 million years ago, also belong to birds, the researchers said.
Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty Images - PHOTO: View of "Ciudad de Itas" rocky outcrop at the Toro Toro National Park, in Bolivia on October 31, 2018.
Carreras Pampa, which spans about 80,570 square feet, is home to the most preserved dinosaur footprints and highest number of dinosaur swim trackways in the world, as well as the highest number of preserved continuous dinosaur swim trackways in the world, according to the paper.
The plethora of tracks shows how the dinosaurs were walking, running and swimming but also how they dragged their tails or took sharp turns amid their journeys, according to the paper.
The swim tracks were likely imprinted when the theropods scratched the bottom of the water with their middle toe, resulting in grooves that appear straight or curved, like a comma, the researchers noted.
Evidence from more than 1,275 trackways were collected and analyzed, according to the paper.
While most sites that feature dinosaur swim tracks only contain individual tracks, Carreras Pampa shows swim tracks that alternate between the right and left foot, according to the paper.
A variety of shapes and sizes of the tracks also indicate that several types of dinosaurs wandered along the ancient coastline as a prehistoric highway, the researchers determined.
Some tracks had footprints that measured less than 4 inches, which is not common in the fossil record, according to the paper. Researchers hypothesize that those footprints belonged to either a smaller theropod species, like Coelophysis, or by juveniles of larger species.
Mid-size theropod dinosaurs, such as Dilophosaurus or Allosaurus, are likely responsible for the largest footprints, which measured more than 12 inches, according to the paper. Larger theropods, such as T. Rex and Giganotosaurus, usually create footprints larger than 16 inches, the researchers said.
Track depths vary from very shallow to very deep, and researchers were able to estimates of the speeds, gaits, and sizes of the track-makers, according to the paper.
While paleontologists were previously aware of the mass existence of ancient footprints, this is the first time the track site was properly studied, according to the paper.
Researchers examined the footprints and swim tracks more closely by sweeping debris off the imprints and clearing sediment from regions where they expected to find additional tracks.
Bolivia is also home to the Cal Orck'o track site, a fossil bed located about 250 miles southeast of Carreras Pampa that also contains a high concentration of dinosaur tracks.
The country has one of the most extensive and diverse records of dinosaur track sites in the world, spanning the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, according to the paper.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 04:43:54 pm »
Popular Science Hubble Space Telescope caught a second glimpse of comet 3I/ATLAS Andrew Paul Fri, December 5, 2025 at 11:50 AM EST 2 min read
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Nov. 30, with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument.
It’s understandable why every space agency and astronomy enthusiast around the world is trying to catch a glimpse of 3I/ATLAS. Not only is it the third-known interstellar object to pass through our solar system,it’s also the fastest comet ever recorded. But even as it races at 130,00 miles per hour towards its closest distance from Earth, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently caught another stunning glimpse of the icy rock.
According to NASA, Hubble took its latest photo of 3I/ATLAS on November 30 using its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. At that point, the comet was around 178 million miles away from Earth. While 3I/ATLAS is clearly visible in the image’s center, the distant stars behind it are a blur thanks to its impressive speed.
Astronomers first noticed 3I/ATLAS in July, which prompted NASA to direct Hubble towards the comet for the first time. Since then, researchers have spent months examining the cosmic traveler. Aside from most certainly not being an alien spacecraft, the comet is estimated to be between 0.2 and 3.5 miles wide. Recent analysis also indicates it may be covered in icy cryovolcanoes.
3I/ATLAS’ impressive speed is also a testament to its age. To attain such a rate, the comet would have required multiple gravitational slingshots as it passed stars, planets, and other galactic objects. Given the universe’s immensity, such events aren’t frequent occurrences. This likely means 3I/ATLAS is billions of years old, possibly forming in some distant corner of the galaxy after breaking off from a proto-planet.
3I/ATLAS will soon pass by the sun and likely continue its journey out of our solar system. Although its orbital path will eventually take it back towards Earth, it won’t happen for thousands of years. This means that every new look at the comet adds to this once-in-a-lifetime event.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 04:34:48 pm »
AFP Volcanic eruptions may have brought Black Death to Europe Frédéric Bourigault Fri, December 5, 2025 at 11:45 AM EST 2 min read
The bubonic plague may have hitched a ride on ships carrying grain to avert a famine caused by volcanos, researchers have argued (CDC/AFP)
Previously unknown volcanic eruptions may have kicked off an unlikely series of events that brought the Black Death -- the most devastating pandemic in human history -- to the shores of mediaeval Europe, new research has revealed.
The outbreak of bubonic plague known as the Black Death killed tens of millions and wiped out up to 60 percent of the population in parts of Europe during the mid-14th century.
How it came to Europe -- and why it spread so quickly on such a massive scale -- have long been debated by historians and scientists.
Now two researchers studying tree rings have suggested that a volcanic eruption may have been the first domino to fall.
By analysing the tree rings from the Pyrenees mountain range in Spain, the pair established that southern Europe had unusually cold and wet summers from 1345 to 1347.
Comparing climate data with written accounts from the time, the researchers demonstrated that temperatures likely dropped because there was less sunlight following one or more volcanic eruptions in 1345.
The change in climate ruined harvests, leading to failed crops and the beginnings of famine.
Fortunately -- or so it seemed -- "powerful Italian city states had established long-distance trade routes across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, allowing them to activate a highly efficient system to prevent starvation," said Martin Bauch, a historian at Germany's Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe.
"But ultimately, these would inadvertently lead to a far bigger catastrophe," he said in a statement.
- Deadly stowaways -
The city states of Venice, Genoa and Pisa had ships bring grain from the Mongols of the Golden Horde in central Asia, which is where the plague is thought to have first emerged.
Previous research has suggested that these grain ships brought along unwelcome passengers: rats carrying fleas infected with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague.
Between 25 and 50 million people are estimated to have died over the next six years.
While the story encompasses natural, demographic, economic and political events in the area, it was ultimately the previously unidentified volcanic eruption that paved the way for one of history's greatest disasters, the researchers argued.
"Although the coincidence of factors that contributed to the Black Death seems rare, the probability of zoonotic diseases emerging under climate change and translating into pandemics is likely to increase in a globalised world," study co-author Ulf Buentgen of Cambridge University in the UK said in a statement.
"This is especially relevant given our recent experiences with Covid-19."
Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan 'The Ethics of Greed'
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