Discoveries

– 201203Clites et al Figure 3 G32828 603x308 1

The Cambrian era marked a profound change on life on Earth, sparking the rapid development of complex organisms and a diversification of the ecosystem, thus the term “Cambrian explosion“. Prior to this period, animals were simple and small, as well as soft bodied, with no hard parts to display. A team of paleontologists at University […]

– 201203tricerotops

Paleontologists have recently named two new horned dinosaur species, closely related to the famous Triceratops, which were dug up from a site in Alberta, Canada some time ago. Dubbed Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni,  the dinosaurs are extremely tiny, as far as plant eating dinosaurs dating back from the late Cretaceous go, and belong to the Leptoceratopsidae family of […]

– 201202exoplanet

The hunt for finding another Earth is making progress every day, as scientists are constantly adding new viable candidates to the list. It’s estimated that in our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, there are between 200 and 400 billion stars – out of all of these, from a statistical point of view, the chances of […]

– 201202crocodile

Casey Holliday, a University of Missouri researcher, was looking through some of the hundreds of unlabeled items kept in a storage facility when he come about a remarkable find –  a skull fragment from an ancient croccodile, dating back from the late Cretaceous, around 95 million years ago. What’s really interesting about the find is […]

– 201201tetrahertz ray scanner

In the popular TV series, Star Trek, one of the most fascinating devices featured, out of the whole myriad of blasters and tractor beams, is the tricorder,  a portable medical scanner and communication device which could detect biological phenomena such as increased blood flow around tumorous growths just by sweeping a person. The closest thing […]

– 201201tiny frog zoom

Measuring only a fraction of a coin, these tiny frogs were discovered hopping around in the tropical forests of Papua New Guinea. But small as they are, they have really big names: Paedophryne amauensis and Paedophryne swiftorum are the smallest vertebrates found so far, according to the report published in PLoS one. Until now, that […]

– 201112elvismonkey

This past year alone, scientists have reveled no less than 208 new species in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia, among them a psychedelic gecko and a monkey with an uncanny “Elvis” hairdo. According to a report released by the WWF, this slew of newly discovered species are part of highly biodiverse region, currently under threat by habitat loss, […]

– 201111Primordial Gas 111011 mdn

One of the fundamental backbones of the Big Bang theory states that after the rapid expansion of the Universe only the lightest elements were formed. A group of scientists stumbled across an amazing discovery recently when they found a gas cloud dating from the time of the early Universe exclusively made out of hydrogen and helium, proving […]