Strange

Credit: The Seismic Record (2024). DOI: 10.1785/0320230049 Strange seismic wave arrivals from a 2010 earthquake under Spain were the clues that led to an unexpected discovery beneath the western Mediterranean: a subducted oceanic slab that has completely overturned. The waveforms paint a picture of a slab that descended rapidly into the Earth's mantle…

February 23, 20244min readSnakes saw a burst of adaptation about 128 million years ago that led to them exploding in diversity and evolving up to three times faster than lizardsBy Jack TamisieaAn eyelash pit viper from the New Wold tropics. Credit: Alejandro Arteaga/Khamai FoundationWhen they first evolved from lizards more than 100 million years ago, snakes were ecological bit players slithering around the fringes of ecosystems dominated by dinosaurs. But today there are around 4,000 species of snakes, ranging in size…

Amidst a cache of glittering golden treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of corroded objects might be the most precious of all.A dull bracelet and a rusted hollow hemisphere decorated with gold are forged, researchers have found, not out of metal from beneath the ground, but with iron from meteorites that fell from the sky.The discovery, led by now-retired head of conservation at the National Archeological Museum Spain, Salvador Rovira-Llorens, suggests that metalworking technology and techniques were far more…

Space, it seems, is teeming not with stars and galaxies but with delicious cosmic snacks.A new object in the Milky Way discovered by a team of astronomers led by Ciprian Berghea of the US Naval Observatory has been given the nickname Dracula's Chivito, after the meat-laden sandwich that is the national dish of Uruguay.In reality, Dracula's Chivito is a baby star surrounded by a thick disk of dust and gas; viewed edge-on, the arrangement sort of looks like a sandwich, if you squint.That's not the only reason for the…

On January 21st, 2024, a meter-sized asteroid (2024 BX1) entered Earth's atmosphere and exploded over Berlin at 12:33 am UTC (07:45 pm EST; 04:33 pm PST).Before it reached Earth, 2024 BX1 was a Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) with an orbit that suggests it was part of the Apollo group.The fragments have since been located by a team of scientists from the Freie Universität Berlin, the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Technische Universität Berlin, and the SETI Institute and identified as a…

Milkweed is a hardy, flowering perennial, toxic to many species including humans. For a duo who make music that sounds like different varieties of folk growing in terrifying patterns out of peculiar soil, it’s a fitting name.The artwork for Milkweed’s Folklore 1979. Photograph: Publicity imageComing in at nine tracks and just over 10 minutes, this is Milkweed’s third release after 2023’s The Mound People and 2022’s Myths and Legends of Wales, all of which use obscure books as their lyrical source matter. This time…

Apple announced the Vision Pro mixed reality headset back in June of 2023 before making it available for preorder on January 19. It's now available for sale as of February 2, and those who were able to place an order quickly have already received their headsets. Those people have been reporting on the internet and social media as to how their first few days of Vision Pro usage have gone.While there have been plenty of success stories and we've seen some truly impressive use of the headset in videos posted online, it's…

Tardigrades stand apart from much of the animal kingdom due to their extreme durability, which famously helps the tiny creatures survive being boiled, frozen, irradiated, and fired from a gun, among other indignities.Hoping to better understand these superpowers, scientists have identified many individual genes that may contribute to tardigrades' survival skills. Less clear, however, is the bigger picture: Where, how, and why did all these amazing adaptations evolve?In a new study, researchers shed a little more light on…

More than half a century ago, Japanese physicist Yosuke Nagaoka theorized a way a magnetic field might expand from meandering electrons restlessly searching for a place to rest that was radically different from conventional models of ferromagnetism.A phenomenon recently observed in a stack of alternating semiconductors could be explained by Nagaoka's speculations, while throwing out a few unforeseen surprises.In an experiment led by researchers from ETH Zürich in Switzerland, atomically thin grids of two different…

You could say it’s the role she was born to play. This month sees the release of This Is Me … Now: A Love Story, a full-length movie in which Jennifer Affleck (nee Lopez) transforms herself into the legendary American singer, actress and pop culture icon known as … J-Lo. Yes, she’s playing herself, or at least a rather strange version of herself.The trailer for the film, which is being released exclusively via Amazon Prime, could not have been better designed for social media intrigue. It features a tear-strewn therapy…