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The revolution in dinosaur science started 50 years ago—here's what we have learned

5 April 2026 @ 4:30 pm

The study of dinosaurs has been through a revolution in recent decades. The story began half a century ago, when Robert McNeill Alexander, a professor of zoology at the University of Leeds, showed how the speed of an animal could be calculated from the spacing of its footprints and its body size.

TESS spots the rise of a black hole X-ray binary system

5 April 2026 @ 4:20 pm

Designed to hunt for new alien worlds, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has serendipitously observed the rising outburst of a black hole X-ray binary known as AT 2019wey. The observations, which may help us better understand the nature of this system, were presented March 25 on the arXiv pre-print server.

The largest survey of exoplanet spins confirms a long-held prediction

5 April 2026 @ 3:00 pm

For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. In the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn both rotate rapidly, completing a rotation in roughly ten hours, while accounting for a significant fraction of the solar system's rotational energy. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i, a team of astronomers tested this predicted relationship by studying 32 gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems—6 giant planets larger than Jupiter and 25 brown dwarf companions.

Stopping algae blooms with bacteria-busting buoys

5 April 2026 @ 2:00 pm

Algae blooms make a pond's surface shine in mesmerizing green hues. But if the microorganisms responsible are cyanobacteria, they can also release toxins that harm humans and wildlife alike. A team reporting in ACS ES&T Water has designed a "set it and forget it" system for distributing algaecide using specialized buoys tethered at the site of a bloom. In tests, the buoys removed nearly all cyanobacteria without the need for frequent reapplication.

Image: NISAR views Mount St. Helens

5 April 2026 @ 1:30 pm

This image captured by U.S.-Indian Earth satellite NISAR on Nov. 10, 2025, shows Washington's Mount St. Helens. The image is cropped from a much larger swath spanning the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR's L-band SAR instrument is able to peer through the clouds at the surface below.

Artemis astronauts to study the moon's surface using mainly their eyes

5 April 2026 @ 12:40 pm

More than 50 years after humans first flew around the moon, Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday and use the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes.

Exploding primordial black holes might have reshaped the early universe, and created all matter as we know it

5 April 2026 @ 12:00 pm

The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it's hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn't filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That's the early universe theorized by a new paper, available in pre-print from arXiv, from researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and MIT anyway.

Artemis astronauts glimpse moon's 'Grand Canyon' ahead of historic lunar flyby

5 April 2026 @ 11:00 am

The Artemis astronauts have taken in sights of the moon never before seen by human eyes, crew members reported on Sunday as their spacecraft crossed the two-thirds mark on their journey to a long-anticipated lunar flyby.

Artemis II toilet acts up again as astronauts speed toward the moon to break Apollo 13's record

5 April 2026 @ 10:29 am

Now more than halfway to the moon, the Artemis II astronauts prepared for their historic lunar fly-around to push deeper into space than even the Apollo astronauts.

AI makes rewilding look tame—and misses its messy reality

4 April 2026 @ 11:30 pm

Humans have always imagined the natural world. From Ice Age cave paintings to the modern day, we depict the animals and landscapes we value—and ignore those we don't.