It had been hiding in plain sight. The original letter — long thought lost — in which Galileo Galilei first set down his arguments against the church’s doctrine that the Sun orbits the Earth has been discovered in a misdated library catalogue in London. Its unearthing and analysis expose critical new details about the saga that led to the astronomer’s condemnation for heresy in 1633.

Considered by many to be the least fish-like of fishes, swamp eels are a real oddity and rarely documented. Now Museum scientists have described an entirely new species. The fish was discovered not in water but in damp soil. Museum researcher Dr Rachunliu G Kamei uncovered it while searching the rainforest for an entirely different group of animal, the legless amphibians called caecilians.

Astrophysicists just found a planet orbiting the star HD 26965, 16 light years away from Earth. Finding exoplanets is always fun, and the fact that this one is in the star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on its surface) is a bonus. But that’s not why people are particularly psyched about the announcement. See, HD 26965 also goes by 40 Eridani A—the star orbited by Spock's homeworld in Star Trek. That means they found Vulcan. Ok, fine, they found a real-world analog to a completely fictional world, but you can't blame Star Trek fans for being excited.

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet—known as Proxima Centauri b—in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions...

A scientific mission into the secret ocean lair of California’s great white sharks has provided tantalizing clues into a vexing mystery — why the fearsome predators spend winter and spring in what has long appeared to be an empty void in the deep sea. A boatload of researchers from five scientific institutions visited the middle-of-nowhere spot between Baja California and Hawaii this past spring on a quest to learn more about what draws the big sharks to what has become known as the White Shark Cafe, almost as if they were pulled by some astrological stimulus.

An unusual visitor has been hanging out in the St. Lawrence River for the past three years: A narwhal, more than 1,000 kilometres south of its usual range. But the lone narwhal is not alone — it appears he has been adopted by a band of belugas. The narwhal — thought to be a juvenile male because of its half-metre-long tusk — was filmed in July playing among a pod of young belugas, thought to be mostly or all males.

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, produces massive amounts of energy. Scientists here on Earth seek to replicate this process, which merges light elements in the form of hot, charged plasma composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, to create a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity in what may be called a “star in a jar.”

Searching the skies for extraterrestrial life means spending a lot of time separating signals from noise. Luckily, AI is particularly good at that. In a new study accepted by The Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe how they used data previously collected from fast radio bursts (FRBs), a type of mysterious pulse from billions of light years away, to train a neural network to find dozens more in already-collected data.

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study.

The weird hexagon swirling around Saturn's north pole is much taller than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers have generally regarded the 20,000-mile-wide (32,000 kilometers) hexagon — a jet stream composed of air moving at about 200 mph (320 km/h) — as a lower-atmosphere phenomenon, restricted to the clouds of Saturn's troposphere.

It has people, and its people call it Big. And doesn’t everyone who is fawned over and photographed like a celebrity have people? Not Mr. Big, as in “Sex and the City,” or Big Daddy or Big Mama, as in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” And not Biggie, like Biggie Smalls, the Notorious B.I.G. Just Big.

A new long-term study using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed a surprising feature emerging at Saturn's northern pole as it nears summertime: a warming, high-altitude vortex with a hexagonal shape, akin to the famous hexagon seen deeper down in Saturn's clouds. The finding, published Sept. 3 in Nature Communications, is intriguing, because it suggests that the lower-altitude hexagon may influence what happens above, and that it could be a towering structure hundreds of miles in height.

Announcing the completion of time-consuming “cleaning” work, a research team in Hokkaido has unveiled what it claims is the largest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Japan. Through the work to remove rocks and sediments in which the fossils were embedded, a total of 157 pieces were identified as bones of a large herbivorous dinosaur from the Hadrosaurid family, according to the team comprising curators of the Hobetsu Museum in Mukawa, Hokkaido, and Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, an associate professor at the Hokkaido University Museum.

Astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen program used AI (artificial intelligence) to find 72 repeating, short, unpredictable radio bursts, from a mysterious source 3 billion light years away.

NASA’s Cassini mission and Hubble Space Telescope provided information that suggest a form of chemical energy, that life can feed on, appears to exist on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

"These things are a blast to find," Superior Township resident Erik Rintamaki told WWJNewsradio.com. He offers guided walking tours to search for the special rocks, which glow when exposed to UV light due to the presence of the fluorescent mineral Sodalite. "I've been a rock picker all my life. I got it from my dad, who got it from his dad," said the 43-year-old, who has a side business as an agate dealer.

Lakes across Alaska and Siberia have started to bubble with methane, and the release of this highly potent greenhouse gas has scientists worried. Last month NASA released footage showing the bubbling Arctic lakes, which are the result of a little known phenomenon called “abrupt thawing.” It occurs when the permafrost—ground that has been frozen for potentially thousands of years—thaws faster than expected.

As it turns out, prime numbers and crystals have a lot in common. A new analysis from researchers at Princeton University suggests that the patterned distribution of prime numbers in the number line is remarkably similar to patterns found in the atomic structure of certain crystal-like materials. In simple terms, the sequence of primes over long stretches of the number line shows properties remarkably similar to the sequence that arises from shining X-rays on an object to reveal its internal atomic structure.

Once upon a time, two early humans of different ancestry met at a cave in Russia. Some 50,000 years later, scientists have confirmed that they had a daughter together. DNA extracted from bone fragments found in the cave show the girl was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

Scientists have been looking for years for the proteins that convert the mechanical movement of inner ears’ hair cells into an electrical signal that the brain interprets as sound. In a study published today (August 22) in Neuron, researchers have confirmed that transmembrane channel-like protein 1 (TMC1) contributes to the pore of the so-called mechanotransduction channel in the cells’ membrane.

Scientists for the first time have used CRISPR gene editing to halt the progression of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in a large mammal, according to a study by UT Southwestern that provides a strong indication that a lifesaving treatment may be in the pipeline. The research published in Science documents unprecedented improvement in the muscle fibers of dogs with DMD – the most common fatal genetic disease in children, caused by a mutation that inhibits the production of dystrophin, a protein critical for muscle function.

Fifty-four years after it was sold by looters, an ancient Maya pictographic text was judged authentic by scholars Thursday. Mexico's National Institute of History and Anthropology said the calendar-style text was made between 1021 and 1154 A.D. and is the oldest known pre-Hispanic document. The 10 surviving pages of the tree-bark folding "book" will now be known as the Mexico Maya Codex. It had been known as the Grolier Codex.

The Klondike region of Canada is famous for its gold, but now other remarkable ancient treasures have been unearthed from the melting permafrost. Two mummified ice age mammals – a wolf pup and a caribou calf – were discovered by gold miners in the area in 2016 and unveiled on Thursday at a ceremony in Dawson in Yukon territory.

A distant galaxy appears filled with dark matter. The outermost stars in the Cosmic Seagull, a galaxy 11.3 billion light-years away, race too fast to be propelled by the gravity of the galaxy’s gas and stars alone. Instead, they move as if urged on by an invisible force, indicating the hidden presence of dark matter, astrophysicist Verónica Motta of the University of Valparaíso in Chile and her colleagues report August 8 at arXiv.org.

Rickets is mostly seen as a 19th-century disease, but research has revealed that the Romans also had a big problem with getting enough vitamin D. Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.

In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole's ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.

If you think Charleston, South Carolina, has plenty of history within its pre-Colonial grounds, just look at what’s been hiding 160 miles off the city’s coast for thousands of years: a giant deep-sea coral reef system. The chief scientist who helped make the discovery called it unbelievable.

In separate studies published online in Nature on Aug. 1, two independent research teams report the discovery of a new, rare type of cell in the human airway. These cells appear to be the primary source of activity of the CFTR gene, mutations to which cause cystic fibrosis, a multiorgan disease that affects more than 70,000 people worldwide.

Though still in preliminary stages, scientists welcome 'big step forward' in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas levels and curtail climate change.

New observations of the hottest known planet have revealed temperatures similar to those typically seen at the surface of a star, as well as an atmosphere of vaporised iron and titanium. The findings add to the diverse and, in some cases, extreme conditions seen on planets far beyond our own solar system. Kevin Heng, a professor at the University of Bern, and co-author of the latest work, said: “The temperatures are so insane that even though it is a planet it has the atmosphere of a star.”

Sequencing the wheat genome – once considered by scientists to be an insurmountable task – has been achieved through a worldwide collaboration of researchers spanning 13 years. On Friday the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) published a detailed description of the genome of bread wheat in the journal Science.

Weeks of dry, hot weather have exposed the outlines of several archeological sites across the U.K., dating back thousands of years. Drier soil conditions have allowed archeologists to capture aerial photographs of previously hidden features from ancient times, to reveal farms, burial monuments, ditches, walls and vegetation patterns, or cropmarks. The patterns of these structures can be seen from the air as the vegetation dies back in dry conditions.

Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but researchers aren’t sure who made them. The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino's limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino's ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.

“It was hiding there, peeking down at us." By Sara C. Nelson.

A stash of fifth-century gold coins worth millions has been found buried in a pot under an Italian theatre. Builders demolishing the former Cressoni theatre in Como were stunned to discover the cache last Wednesday. The Roman coins will be examined and dated before ending up in a museum, officials said.