ALLEN ALLEN blue tunic top

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have spotted GNz7q, a black hole that existed only 750 million years after the Big Bang, in one of the best-studied areas of the night sky, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-North) field. An artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole that is inside the dust-shrouded core of a starburst galaxy. Image credit: NASA...

The Bamboo Annals (Zhúshū Jìnián) is a historical chronicle of the history of ancient China, spanning ca. 2400 to 299 BCE. A fragment of the Bamboo Annals. Image credit: National Diet Library of Japan. “Historical auroral reports extend our knowledge of solar eruptions and long-term solar variability in the millennial time scale beyond the chronological coverage of instrumental observations,...

Machu Picchu, one of the most recognized archaeological sites in the world, is located high (2,430 m above sea level) above the Urubamba River on a narrow saddle between two mountain peaks. The larger peak, called Machu Picchu (3,082 m), stands to the south, while the smaller peak, Huayna Picchu (2,720 m), is located to the north. A new paper by Ministry of Culture of Peru historian Donato Amado...

The top predator of the Jurassic and Cretaceous landscapes was usually a species of carnivorous dinosaur. These predators walked on two legs, had powerful jaws lined with sharp teeth and included species from groups known as tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs and carcharodontosaurs. Thanatotheristes degrootorum. Image credit: Julius Scotonyi, Royal Tyrrell Museum. Tyrannosaurus rex, the goat-eating, jeep-chasing...

Prasophyllum morganii was first collected from a single population in Victoria, Australia, in 1929, but has not been collected since 1933. Prasophyllum morganii. Image credit: Ayre et al., doi: 10.11646/phytotaxa.528.2.1. Prasophyllum morganii, also known as the Cobungra leek orchid or the mignonette leek orchid, is a species of orchid endemic to a small area in Victoria. The species was described...Adidas Tracksuit 6-9m

Physicists from the MicroBooNE Collaboration at Fermilab have performed a first-of-its-kind measurement: a comprehensive set of the energy-dependent neutrino-argon interaction cross sections. An illustration of the idea that a neutrino (v) and an electron (e) interact with a nuclei in comparable ways. Image credit: Jefferson Lab. Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles that are both famously elusive...

A team of U.S. researchers has discovered a potential candidate for drug development from a rare species of actinomycete bacterium called Lentzea flaviverrucosa. Scanning electron micrograph showing rod-shaped fragments of the aerial mycelium of Lentzea flaviverrucosa grown on modified Sauton’s agar for 8 days at 28 degrees Celsius. Magnification 8,000x. Image credit: Xie et al., doi: 10.1099/00207713-52-5-1815. Actinomycetes...

Biological structures frequently exhibit modularity and symmetry, but the origin of such trends is not well understood. It can be tempting to assume — by analogy to engineering design — that symmetry and modularity arise from natural selection. However, evolution, unlike engineers, cannot plan ahead, and so these traits must also afford some immediate selective advantage which is hard...

Calcium silicate perovskite (CaSiO3) is arguably the most geochemically important phase in the Earth’s lower mantle, because it concentrates elements that are incompatible in the upper mantle. No one has ever successfully retrieved this high-pressure compound from the lower mantle before. This is because CaSiO3-perovskite is ‘unquenchable,’ meaning that it cannot retain its structure after...

The conventional theory about the origin of the state is that the adoption of farming increased land productivity, which led to the production of food surplus; this surplus was a prerequisite for the emergence of tax-levying elites and, eventually, states. Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Professor Joram Mayshar and colleagues challenge this theory and propose that hierarchy arose as a result of...