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In a pale world of ice and snow, the last color you expect to see on the horizon is red.In 1911, during a British expedition to Antarctica, researchers were shocked to notice a glacier 'bleeding' from its tongue onto an ice-covered lake.The crimson drool is known as Blood Falls, and it's taken experts more than a century to figure out what is actually causing the eerie coloring.When a team of US scientists took samples from Taylor Glacier's rusty tongue in November 2006 and mid and late November 2018, and analyzed the…

Ken Livi, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, may have finally discovered the secret behind the mysterious “Blood Falls” of Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. Discovered over 100 years ago during the infamous Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica in 1911, the “Blood Falls” were named after the bright red water that seems to flow from the falls. While many believed that the falls acquired this red color due to minerals in the water, new research on samples taken from the fall point towards a much different…

Optical illusions are tricky little things. Often they can leave us scratching our heads, trying to figure out how the illusion is tricking our eyes and our brain. One type of illusion, known as a “simultaneous contrast illusion,” may finally have an explanation, though, according to a new study. See that image at the top of the article? While it might seem like the gray rectangle in the middle is composed of two different colors at first glance, it’s actually just one color, though it appears to be two…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Two weeks ago, a modest-looking paper was uploaded to the arXiv preprint server with the unassuming title "On the invariant subspace problem in Hilbert spaces." The paper is just 13 pages long and its list of references contains only a single entry. The paper purports to contain the final piece of a jigsaw…

Tigers may not change their stripes, but Jupiter sure does. The giant planet's surprisingly neat, alternating bands of dark and light clouds periodically change their appearance, but the reason for these cyclic variations is a mystery.Now, after studying data on Jupiter's magnetic field collected by the Juno probe, a team of scientists from Japan, Spain, and the UK think they've cracked it. The changes seen in Jupiter's stripes coincide with magnetic oscillations inside the gas world."It is possible to get wavelike…

Images from a ground-based infra-red telescope, showing Jupiter at 5 micron wavelength radiation. The remarkable change between May 2001 and December 2011 in the North Equatorial Belt (highlighted between the dashed blue lines) can be seen. Credit: Arrate Antuñano/NASA/IRTF/NSFCam/SpeXResearchers have used <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>NASA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1958, the National…

This is an artist’s impression of a runaway supermassive black hole. Researchers at the IAC have discovered that an unusual thin structure of stars might actually be a galaxy seen edge-on, rather than a trail left by a fleeing supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)A study carried out by a team of researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has shown that an unusually thin structure of stars, recently discovered by the <span class="glossaryLink"…

Two QUT researchers used a standard laptop and a piece of rock from a diamond mine waste pile to solve a long-standing geological puzzle about diamond formation in the Earth’s ancient continents.Two researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have utilized a simple laptop computer and a piece of rock, obtained from a diamond mine’s “waste pile”, to unravel a long-standing geological mystery surrounding the formation of diamonds in the deep roots of the earth’s ancient continents.The lead author, QUT Ph.D.…

Researchers deciphered the structure of an ion channel from the rod cells of the eye (shown in blue) while it interacts with the protein calmodulin (purple). This interaction is important to the function not only of the ion channel in the eye, but also of ion channels in other parts of the body such as the heart. Credit: Paul Scherrer Institute / Dina SchusterExciting new findings shed light on the interaction between the protein calmodulin and an ion channel in the eye, potentially unlocking the secret behind our eyes’…

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have proposed a hypothesis to explain the scarcity of insects in marine environments. They believe that insects’ unique chemical mechanism, involving molecular oxygen and an enzyme called multicopper oxidase-2 (MCO2), for hardening their shells gives them an advantage on land but is a disadvantage in the sea.New hypothesis says it’s to do with how they harden their shells.Scientists propose that the unique enzyme MCO2, which helps insects harden their shells, is the reason…