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Categories: Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology, Space: Astrophysics

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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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What do margaritas, vinegar, and ant stings have in common? They contain chemical ingredients that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has identified surrounding two young protostars known as IRAS 2A and IRAS 23385. Although planets are not yet forming around those stars, these and other molecules detected there by Webb represent key ingredients for making potentially habitable worlds.

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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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When you are trying to solve one of the biggest conundrums in cosmology, you should triple check your homework. The puzzle, called the 'Hubble Tension,' is that the current rate of the expansion of the universe is faster than what astronomers expect it to be, based on the universe's initial conditions and our present understanding of the universe's evolution.

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A team of physicists has developed a method to detect gravity waves with such low frequencies that they could unlock the secrets behind the early phases of mergers between supermassive black holes, the heaviest objects in the universe.

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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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The James Webb Space Telescope makes one of the most unexpected findings within its first year of service: A high number of faint little red dots in the distant Universe could change the way we understand the genesis of supermassive black holes.

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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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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.

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A team of astronomers has shed new light on the fascinating and complex process of planet formation. The research brings together observations of more than 80 young stars that might have planets forming around them, providing astronomers with a wealth of data and unique insights into how planets arise in different regions of our galaxy.

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It takes more than a galaxy merger to make a black hole grow and new stars form: machine learning shows cold gas is needed too to initiate rapid growth -- new research finds.

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A new fossil, named 'Attenborough's strange bird' after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, is the first of its kind to evolve a toothless beak. It's from a branch of the bird family tree that went extinct in the mass extinction 66 million years ago, and this strange bird is another puzzle piece that helps explain why some birds -- and their fellow dinosaurs -- went extinct, and others survived to today.

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Scientists provide fresh insights on the origins of life, presenting compelling evidence supporting the 'RNA World' hypothesis. The study unveils an RNA enzyme that can make accurate copies of other functional RNA strands, while also allowing new variants of the molecule to emerge over time. These remarkable capabilities suggest the earliest forms of evolution may have occurred on a molecular scale in RNA, and also bring scientists one step closer to re-creating autonomous RNA-based life in the laboratory.

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Looking deeply into space and time, astronomers have studied the exceptionally luminous galaxy GN-z11, which existed when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only about 430 million years old.