The newly-discovered isotope, plutonium-227, has a half-life of 0.78 seconds, according to a team of physicists from China. “The magic numbers of protons and neutrons, such as 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, ...

In a new study, astronomers compared high-resolution images of Uranus from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to the more-distant view from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Their results may serve as ...

A team of biologists in Israel has grown an extinct — or at least extirpated — tree species of the myrrh genus Commiphora from an ancient seed found in the northern Judean Desert in the 1980s. The ...

Paleontologists have described three new enantiornithine birds from the Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, two of which represent new avisaurid species. These birds lived alongside dinosaurs 68 million ...

The venom of black widow spiders contains a cocktail of seven specific latrotoxins, but only one — α-latrotoxin — targets vertebrates, including humans. Chemists at the University of Münster have now ...

A team of marine biologists led by a Florida International University researcher has described a new species of the shark genus Sphyrna from the Caribbean and the Southwest Atlantic. Named for the ...

Paleontologists have announced the discovery of a new species in the tyrannosaurid dinosaur genus Labocania, based on a partial skeleton found in Coahuila, Mexico. The newly-discovered dinosaur ...

Paleontologists in Brazil have examined the well-preserved fossilized remains of two mammal-precursor species: Brasilodon quadrangularis and Riograndia guaibensis. The findings offer critical insights ...

During the Mesozoic era, between 250 and 120 million years ago, an ancient seafloor sank deep into Earth in the East Pacific Rise, a tectonic plate boundary on the floor of the southeastern Pacific ...

Despite the long history of consumption of fermented dairy, little is known about how the fermented microbes were utilized and evolved over human history. By retrieving ancient DNA of 3,500-year-old ...

“There are many types of flatworms, but most of them are aquatic,” said North Carolina State University diagnostic entomologist Matt Bertone. “Most of the flatworms that you do find on land exist in ...

This ancient Byzantine church was dedicated to the Christian martyr Bacchus the Holy, according to archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The remains of the ancient Byzantine ...