Frothy and Toxic Bubbles Cover One of India’s Most Famous Beaches

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  2 minutes  |  348 words  |  Fernande Dalal

A beach in India is coated in knee-deep foam that experts warn is toxic.  But that danger hasn't stopped tourists from frolicking in the surf-churned white froth, according to the news organization AFP. The stretch of coast, Marina Beach in Chennai, is the largest urban beach in India and sees tens of thousands of visitors daily.  The foam is also a recurrent visitor to the beach, appearing each year when the monsoon rains wash pollution into the sea, according to AFP. [Read More]

NASA reveals stunning 'Cosmic Reef' blasting to life in nearby galaxy

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  460 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

Young stars blaze to life in a nearby galaxy, repainting their cosmic neighborhood with fiery blooms of gas and radiation. This new Hubble Space Telescope image captures just another day in the life of two young nebulas (one red, one blue) in theLarge Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 163,000light-years away. But for scientists and space enthusiasts on Earth, the image also marks a special anniversary. [Read More]

Picasso painting found hidden beneath his famous 'Still Life'

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  629 words  |  Trudie Dory

A hidden drawing by Pablo Picasso has been found beneath one of the artist's abstract paintings, called "Still Life." A team from the Art Institute of Chicago was interested in looking more closely at the painting, which is held at the institute, to help understand its complex layers of paint and areas where the painting appears to be wrinkled. To do so, they used X-ray and infrared imaging, and to their surprise they saw a hidden drawing of " [Read More]

Power of the Future: 10 Ways to Run the 21st Century

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  9 minutes  |  1758 words  |  Arica Deslauriers

New energy sourcesScientists are racing to perfect greener sources of energy to improve the environment and reduce dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. Some predict a hydrogen economy. Others say solar is the way to go. Wilder schemes involve sky-high wind turbines or antimatter engines. LiveScience explores the expectations, myths and realities of 10 top possibilities. AntimatterAntimatter is the Bizarro twin of matter, made up of antiparticles that have the same mass as ordinary matter but with opposite atomic properties known as spin and charge. [Read More]

Snakes Masquerade as Poisonous Vipers to Avoid Attacks

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  479 words  |  Trudie Dory

Harmless snakes can apparently squish their heads to look like venomous vipers and avoid getting eaten, scientists find. Vipers such as rattlesnakes are notorious for their venom. They also have distinctive triangular head shapes, due to how their venom glands fill up the backs of their heads. Scientists noticed that many grass snakes (Natrix natrix), viperine snakes (Natrix maura) and a number of other nonvenomous serpents could flatten their normally rather narrow heads into triangular shapes. [Read More]

Stellar Black Hole Is So Massive It Shouldn't Exist

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  635 words  |  Patria Henriques

Editor's Note: The findings of this study have been called into question because of a potential error in the analysis of starlight from the companion star. That error would mean the black hole is about the size of our sun, rather than 70 times the mass of our sun. A gigantic stellar black hole 15,000 light-years from Earth is twice as massive as what researchers thought was possible in our own galaxy. [Read More]

Study Explains Why We're Not All Beautiful

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  512 words  |  Arica Deslauriers

A new study explains why we aren't all born with Brad Pitt’s perfectly chiseled features or Angelina Jolie’s pouty lips. A long-standing thorn in the side of biologists has been the difficulty in accounting for the enormous variation between individuals when sexual selection by females for the most attractive mates should quickly spread the “best” genes through a population. “It is a major problem for evolutionary biology,” said study team leader Marion Petrie of Newcastle University. [Read More]

Teen Unearths Milk Cans Holding WWII Heirlooms from Aristocratic Prussian Family

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  695 words  |  Fernande Dalal

A teenager unexpectedly discovered a cache of World War II artifacts — including an officer's uniform from the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany — hidden in two milk cans buried by a lake in what is now northeastern Poland. The cans also held a 70-year-old toothbrush, a pocket watch and a diary, according to Science in Poland. The teen's parents promptly reported the finding to authorities, who identified the heirlooms' original owners: an aristocratic Prussian family headed by Count Hans Joachim von Finckenstein, who lived by the lake when it was a German province during World War II, according to Science in Poland. [Read More]

The Polar Vortex Is Collapsing — Here's What That Means for Your Winter Weather

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  836 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

The blast of Arctic weather headed for the United States this weekend could be a first sign of still worse things to come this winter, with signs that a circular low-pressure system of swirling winds that normally keeps frigid air locked up at the North Pole has been disrupted and split into smaller parts. The disruption in this counterclockwise-spinning beast, called the polar vortex, is thought to be caused in part by a warm summer over the Arctic and a relatively cold fall over Siberia. [Read More]

Triceratops Horns Used in Battle

 Posted on September 5, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  494 words  |  Patria Henriques

About 100 million years ago, Triceratops likely engaged in horn-to-horn battles with its kin, according to a new analysis of the scrapes, bruises and healing fractures preserved on fossils of the dinosaurs' bony headgear. "Paleontologists have debated the function of the bizarre skulls of horned dinosaurs for years now," said lead study researcher Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California. "Some speculated that the horns were for showing off to other dinosaurs, and others thought that the horns had to have been used in combat against other horned dinosaurs. [Read More]