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Categories: Ecology: Extinction, Space: Structures and Features

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The supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way is spinning so quickly it is warping the spacetime surrounding it into a shape that can look like a football, according to a new study. That football shape suggests the black hole is spinning at a substantial speed, which researchers estimated to be about 60% of its potential limit.

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Divers are essentially tourists who love coral reefs and invest a lot of time and effort to watch them. Unfortunately, divers also cause damage to corals, often unintentionally, through disturbing and resuspending sand, touching them, hitting them with their equipment, and scaring fish away. Artificial reefs have been proposed as a means of diverting diving pressure from the natural reef to alternative sites, thus preserving both dive tourism and the coral reef.

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A thousand kilometers south of Tokyo, far into the largest ocean on Earth, lies a chain of small, volcanic islands -- the Ogasawara Islands. Nature has been able to develop on its own terms here, far from both humans and the warm Kuroshio current, which acts like a shuttle, moving marine species from Taiwan, over the Ryukyu Islands, and up the Pacific coast of mainland Japan. With upwards of 70 % of trees and many animal species being endemic to the archipelago, the islands have been dubbed 'the Galapagos of the East', as they are valuable as both a biodiversity hotspot and a cradle of scientific discovery.

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Research shows the relationship between a species' age and its risk of going extinct could be accurately predicted by an ecological model called the 'neutral theory of biodiversity.'

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A few years ago, astronomers uncovered one of the Milky Way's greatest secrets: an enormous, wave-shaped chain of gaseous clouds in our sun's backyard, giving birth to clusters of stars along the spiral arm of the galaxy we call home. Naming this astonishing new structure the Radcliffe Wave, the team now reports that the Radcliffe Wave not only looks like a wave, but also moves like one -- oscillating through space-time much like 'the wave' moving through a stadium full of fans.

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Researchers propose a framework for integrating online digital data into biodiversity monitoring.

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In creating five new isotopes, scientists have brought the stars closer to Earth. The isotopes are known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187 and lutetium-190.

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If gravitational condensate stars (or gravastars) actually existed, they would look similar to black holes to a distant observer. Two theoretical physicists have now found a new solution to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, according to which gravitational stars could be structured like a Russian matryoshka doll, with one gravastar located inside another.

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Corals searching for food in the cold and dark waters of the deep sea are building higher and higher mountains to get closer to the source of their food. But in doing so, they may find themselves trapped when the climate changes.

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Global warming may be interacting with regional rainfall and deforestation to accelerate forest loss in the Amazon, pushing it towards partial or total collapse. New research has identified the potential thresholds of these stressors, showing where their combined effects could produce a 'tipping point' -- in which the forest is so fragile that just a small disturbance could cause an abrupt shift in the state of the ecosystem.

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Australian birds that live on islands are among the species most at risk of extinction, a first-of-its-kind study has shown. Australia has over 750 native bird species. But many of them are facing an uncertain future.

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New research revealed that when coral bleaching occurs, corals release unique organic compounds into the surrounding water that not only promote bacterial growth overall, but select for opportunistic bacteria that may further stress reefs.

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Fossils of a marine animal that lived 500 million years ago, combined with computer simulations, informed the design of a new soft robot.

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Scientists have discovered five dazzling new species of eyelash vipers in the jungles and cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador.

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Astronomers have uncovered evidence of how the enigmatic gap in the size distribution of exoplanets at around two Earth radii emerges. Their computer simulations demonstrate that the migration of icy, so-called sub-Neptunes into the inner regions of their planetary systems could account for this phenomenon. As they draw closer to the central star, evaporating water ice forms an atmosphere that makes the planets appear larger than in their frozen state. Simultaneously, smaller rocky planets gradually lose a portion of their original gaseous envelope, causing their measured radius to shrink over time.

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Dinosaurs' range of locomotion made them incredibly adaptable, researchers have found.

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New research reveals that denser, and more sheltered, kelp forests can withstand serious stressors amid warming ocean temperatures.

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Employing massive data sets collected through NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are unearthing clues to conditions existing in the early universe. The team has catalogued the ages of stars in the Wolf--Lundmark--Melotte (WLM) galaxy, constructing the most detailed picture of it yet, according to the researchers. WLM, a neighbor of the Milky Way, is an active center of star formation that includes ancient stars formed 13 billion years ago.

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A carbon monoxide (CO)-runaway gap identified in the atmospheres of Earth-like planets can help expand the search for habitable planets. This gap, identified through atmospheric modeling, is an indicator of a CO-rich atmosphere on Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars. CO is an important compound for the formation of prebiotic organic compounds, which are building blocks for more complex molecules for the formation of life.

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Black holes not only existed at the dawn of time, they birthed new stars and supercharged galaxy formation, a new analysis of James Webb Space Telescope data suggests.