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Categories: Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology, Space: Structures and Features

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Archaeological analysis of a near unique animal cemetery discovered in London nearly 30 years ago has revealed there was an international horse trading network, orchestrated by the elites of late medieval and Tudor England, which brought superior physical specimens to the UK for jousting and for use as status symbols.

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Astronomers have identified what could be two of the Milky Way's earliest building blocks: Named 'Shakti' and 'Shiva', these appear to be the remnants of two galaxies that merged between 12 and 13 billion years ago with an early version of the Milky Way, contributing to our home galaxy's initial growth. The new find is the astronomical equivalent of archeologists identifying traces of an initial settlement that grew into a large present-day city.

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Scientists have uncovered the fossilized skull of a 270-million-year-old ancient amphibian ancestor in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The team of researchers described the fossil as a new species of proto-amphibian, which they named Kermitops gratus in honor of the iconic Muppet, Kermit the Frog.

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The first generation of stars transformed the universe. Inside their cores, simple hydrogen and helium fused into a rainbow of elements. When these stars died, they exploded and sent these new elements across the universe. The iron running in your veins and the calcium in your teeth and the sodium powering your thoughts were all born in the heart of a long-dead star.

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Scientists have created a giant quantum vortex to mimic a black hole in superfluid helium that has allowed them to see in greater detail how analogue black holes behave and interact with their surroundings.

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Detailed reports on thousands of artifacts pulled from 'Britain's Pompeii' reveals the surprisingly sophisticated domestic lives of Bronze Age Fen folk some 3,000 years ago -- from home interiors to recipes, clothing, kitchenware and pets.

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Dark matter is one of science's greatest mysteries. Although it is believed to make up about 85 percent of the cosmos, scientists know very little about its fundamental nature. Research provides some of the most stringent constraints on the nature of dark matter yet. It also revealed a small hint of a signal that, if real, could be confirmed in the next decade or so.

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A new study has challenged previously held views that brain preservation in the archaeological record is extremely rare. The team compiled a new archive of preserved human brains, which highlighted that nervous tissues actually persist in much greater abundances than traditionally thought, assisted by conditions that prevent decay.

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Researchers have uncovered intriguing details about the origins and spread of the bottle gourd, one of the oldest domesticated crops. Their work unveils the genetic diversification and population history of this hard-shelled plant that was used to make bottles, instruments, and containers for over 10,000 years by ancient civilizations.

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Dinosaurs get all the glory. But aetosaurs, a heavily armored cousin of modern crocodiles, ruled the world before dinosaurs did. These tanks of the Triassic came in a variety of shapes and sizes before going extinct around 200 million years ago. Today, their fossils are found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia.

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Astronomers have charted the largest-ever volume of the universe with a new map of active supermassive black holes living at the centers of galaxies. Called quasars, the gas-gobbling black holes are, ironically, some of the universe's brightest objects. The new map logs the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, the furthest of which shone bright when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old. The work could help scientists better understand the properties of dark matter.

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A new study challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.

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Physicists often turn to the Rayleigh-Taylor instability to explain why fluid structures form in plasmas, but that may not be the full story when it comes to the ring of hydrogen clumps around supernova 1987A, research suggests. It looks like the same mechanism that breaks up airplane contrails might be at play in forming the clumps of hydrogen gas that ring the remnant of supernova 1987A.

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The formation of stars and the chaotic environments they inhabit is one of the most well-studied, but also mystery-shrouded, areas of cosmic investigation. The intricacies of these processes are now being unveiled like never before by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

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The oldest fossilized forest known on Earth -- dating from 390 million years ago -- has been found in the high sandstone cliffs along the Devon and Somerset coast of South West England.

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Neutron star mergers are a treasure trove for new physics signals, with implications for determining the true nature of dark matter, according to physicists.

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A galaxy that suddenly stopped forming new stars more than 13 billion years ago has been observed by astronomers. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted a 'dead' galaxy when the universe was just 700 million years old, the oldest such galaxy ever observed.

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Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you'll likely learn that they are 'dead stars' that continuously cool down over time. Astronomers are challenging this theory after discovering a population of white dwarf stars that stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.

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Space weather experts are urging regulators and space tourism innovators to work together to protect their passengers and crews from the risks of space weather radiation exposure.

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Fossils of a strange new species of marine lizard with dagger-like teeth that lived 66 million years ago, show a dramatically more biodiverse ocean ecosystem to what we see today.