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A star 1,300 light-years from Earth might have just revealed one of the Solar System's best-kept secrets.It's called V883 Orionis, a young star surrounded by a huge disk of material that will one day coalesce into orbiting planets. It's in that disk that scientists have made an unambiguous detection of water vapor, swirling around with all the other dust and gas destined to become part of an alien world.This suggests that the Solar System's water – including that now on Earth – was present in the gaseous cradle from…

Earth is under constant bombardment from space. Dust, pebbles, and chunks of rock fall into our atmosphere on a daily basis, sometimes burning up spectacularly in a blazing streak across the sky.These bolides, or fireballs, are typically larger pieces of asteroid or comet that have broken off their parent body and wound up falling into Earth's gravity well.But scientists have ascertained that one such fireball that exploded over Canada last year is not the usual kind of meteor. Based on its trajectory across the sky, a…

Do Kwon, a co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, has not been back to his home country of South Korea since the country’s prosecutors put out an arrest warrant for him back in September.Screenshot: Terraform Labs/YouTubeThe once-famed and now notorious crypto founder Do Kwon’s “totally unprompted” world tour now has him holed up in Serbia, according to reports citing the South Korean prosecutor’s office tasked with arresting the 31-year-old.The Korean news outlet Yonhap wrote early Monday local time that the Seoul…

Australian scientists have discovered strangely folded diamonds in rare meteorite samples. In investigating how they came to form, the team found evidence that they were forged in a cataclysm on an ancient dwarf planet.Diamond is famously the hardest known natural material, and as such it isn’t exactly known for its flexibility. That’s why scientists on the new study were surprised to find diamonds with distinctive folded structures inside meteorites.Specifically, the meteorites belonged to a class known as ureilites,…

At Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, scientists studying mice found that fat entering the intestines triggers a signal. Conducted along nerves to the brain, this signal drives a desire for fatty foods. Published September 7, 2022, in Nature, the new study raises the possibility of interfering with this gut-brain connection to help prevent unhealthy choices and address the growing global health crisis caused by overeating. "We live in unprecedented times, in which the…

There's not a lot, comparatively, going on at the Moon. There's dust. There's rock. There's basalt plains, the product of extensive volcanism over much of the Moon's history.And, as we have recently discovered, there's water. Lots of water. Bound up in the lunar regolith. Trapped in volcanic glass. Possibly even in sheets of ice on or just below the surface, hiding in craters at the poles that lurk in permanent shadow, where it can't be sublimated by the heat of the Sun.  Where this water might have come from is still…

What's in a head? According to new research, a little bit of our ancestors' tails.In the early days of complex, multicellular life on Earth, animals started out without any spines or brains. They only had a network of neurons spread throughout their body. Over the course of millions of years, however, that system somehow became concentrated on one end. But how?  Tunicates, or 'sea squirts', are the closest living relatives of vertebrates, and they don't have a true head.Their central nervous system is instead made up of…

Researchers have linked increased numbers of mutations in children to a higher rate of random mutations in sperm cells of the biological father, associated with chemotherapy or rare genetic defects in DNA repair.Scientists have traced the cause of increased numbers of mutations in children to a higher rate of random mutations in sperm cells of the biological father, associated with rare genetic defects in <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div…