The world's 'best preserved' baby woolly mammoth has been found in a Siberian crater known as the Mouth of Hell.

The mammoth, who has been named Yana, lived more than 50,000 years old and evidently suffered a fatal injury to her back during the Ice Age. She was around one-year-old when she was killed.

Yana was preserved in the permafrost in the Batagai megaslump, a rapidly expanding thermokarst depression in the Yakutia region of Russia, which is visible from space and also known as Gateway to the Underworld.

Of seven baby woolly mammoths found in the world - six of them in Russia - Yana is the most intact, with her trunk clearly visible and 'uniquely preserved'.

But it could take days to know if it survived

On Christmas Eve, NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew closer to the sun than any human-made object ever — a stunning technological feat that scientists liken to the historic Apollo moon landing in 1969.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is spending Christmas Eve on a history-making attempt to fly closer to the sun than we have ever been before — a stunning technological feat that scientists liken to the historic Apollo moon landing in 1969.

At 6:53 a.m. ET on Tuesday (Dec. 24), the car-sized spacecraft was scheduled to zoom within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface, nearly 10 times closer than Mercury's orbit around the star. The probe was traveling at an incredible speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 kph) — fast enough to travel from Tokyo to Washington, D.C. in less than a minute — breaking its own record as the fastest human-made object in history.

Sloths weren't always slow-moving, furry tree-dwellers. Their prehistoric ancestors were huge — up to 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) — and when startled, they brandished immense claws.

For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.

But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier — perhaps far earlier — than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.

Advance opens door for secure quantum applications without specialized infrastructure.
Northwestern University engineers are the first to successfully demonstrate quantum teleportation over a fiber optic cable already carrying Internet traffic.

The discovery, published in the journal Optica, introduces the new possibility of combining quantum communication with existing Internet cables — greatly simplifying the infrastructure required for for advanced sensing technologies or quantum computing applications.

"This is incredibly exciting because nobody thought it was possible," said Northwestern's Prem Kumar, who led the study. "Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fiber optic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level."

An expert in quantum communication, Kumar is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, where he directs the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing.

While investigating a mysterious radiation signal unlike any seen before, astronomers may have uncovered a rare pair of binary supermassive black holes with a truly monstrous appetite.

Supermassive black holes — cosmic titans with masses of 100,000 to billions of times the mass of the sun — are among the universe's most fearsome phenomena. These celestial behemoths can consume entire stars and unleash torrents of powerful radiation visible across vast cosmic distances. However, in a recent study, researchers observed something entirely unprecedented: a pair of supermassive black holes devouring an enormous gas cloud that's unlike any celestial meal scientists have ever seen.

This discovery, made possible by a curious radiation signal, offers new insight into the behavior of these cosmic giants and their relationship with the galaxies they inhabit.

Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Valparaíso in Chile and lead author of a new study on the ravenous black holes, told Live Science via email:

"The light that is emitted from the system shows an oscillatory pattern that is repeated every 60 - 90 days, and this is the first time that this kind of variation is observed in an active galactic nucleus,""This pattern is observed in the X-rays, ultraviolet and optical frequencies, making this system unique."

Synthetic biologists make artificial cells, but one particular kind isn't worth the risk.

As synthetic biologists, we have spent the last few decades in awe of the breakthroughs in the field. In the last fifteen years, synthetic biologists have stored books, images, and even videos in DNA, developed the ability to modify and engineer genes with remarkable accuracy, and even created an organism with chromosome designed using a computer and synthesized in the lab.^1-5

These advances have allowed us to develop effective drugs against diseases like malaria, innovate lightweight, biodegradable, and high-strength materials such as artificial spider silk, and bolster our understanding of how life forms.^6-8 In many cases, these breakthroughs were unforeseen and would not have happened if scientists could not conduct their research freely.

We may - not too-long from today - look back fondly on the days when a headrest was just a headrest. Kind of like the way a steering wheel used to be just a steering wheel - before it became a "safety" device.

One that sometimes explodes shrapnel in your face.

But how about a headrest that gets into your head? One that houses a scanner that monitors your brainwaves - also for "safety" reasons? It is apparently in the works. A company by the name of Neumo has reportedly been "shopping" a "contactless, non-invasive way of collecting brainwave activity data and helping (car companies) interpret it in a way that can ensure drivers stay alert and are otherwise in tip-top driving form."

How, exactly, will this be done?

Neumo's headrest scanner is based on a "sensor that can be mounted discreetly in the vehicle's headrest to collect brainwaves passively from up to 12 ins. (30.5 cm) away" and a "printed-circuit-board antenna that detects the brain activity and a receiver to relay the information collected."

Relayed to whom? Well, the car's computer, of course.

"Data gathered is crunched by Neumo's proprietary software and scored on a 10-point scale, evaluating the driver's level of distraction and drowsiness, state of health and well-being and the amount of workload and stress they are under."

Italics added.

The entire surface of the inner core, or small patches of it, may be swelling and contracting.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Earth's inner core, a solid metal ball gyrating within the molten outer core, may be both slowing down and changing shape.

Recent analyses of earthquake waves have suggested that around 15 years ago, the inner core's rotation may have slowed so much that it appeared to pause or reverse direction relative to the surface. But a new analysis suggests something more must be changing at Earth's center.

The most probable explanation is that the inner core is not only rotating differently — its surface is probably also morphing, geophysicist John Vidale of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles reported December 9 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The finding could help resolve a long-standing debate over what is changing at the inner core.

No instrument can physically probe Earth's core. So, researchers study it using seismic waves from earthquakes. Scientists typically use quakes that occur in the South Sandwich Islands near Antarctica, which repose on the opposite side of the planet from instrument arrays in Alaska. The earthquake waves travel through the planet like sonar waves through water, with some passing through the inner core on their way to Alaska. Instruments there then record the waves as squiggly signatures called waveforms, which contain information about what the waves encountered on their journey through Earth.

Astronomers analyzing archival images from JWST have discovered an unexpectedly vast population of the smallest asteroids ever seen in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Astronomers analyzing archival images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered an unexpectedly vast population of the smallest asteroids ever seen in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The finding could lead to better tracking of the tiny but powerful space rocks that are likely to approach Earth.

The newfound asteroids range in size from that of a bus to several stadiums — tiny compared to the massive space rock that wiped out most dinosaurs, but they nevertheless pack a significant punch. Only a decade ago an asteroid just tens of meters in size took everyone by surprise when it exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and released 30 times more energy than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima in WWII.

These so-called "decameter" asteroids collide with Earth 10,000 times more frequently than their larger counterparts, but their small size makes it challenging for surveys to detect them well in advance.

In recent years, a team of astronomers including Julien de Wit, an associate professor of planetary science at MIT, has been testing a computationally-intensive method to identify passing asteroids in telescope images of faraway stars.

By applying this method to thousands of JWST images of the host star in about 40 light-years distant TRAPPIST-1 system, which is the best-studied planetary system beyond our own, the researchers found eight previously known and 138 new decameter asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Among them, six appear to have been gravitationally nudged by nearby planets into trajectories that will bring them close to Earth. An early, unedited release of the findings was published Dec. 9 in the journal Nature.

"We thought we would just detect a few new objects, but we detected so many more than expected — especially small ones," de Wit said in a statement. "It is a sign that we are probing a new population regime."

For the first time, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has detected and "weighed" a galaxy that not only existed about 600 million years after the Big Bang, but also has a mass that is similar to what our Milky Way galaxy's mass might have been at the same stage of development.

Other galaxies Webb has detected at this period in the history of the universe are significantly more massive. Nicknamed the Firefly Sparkle, this galaxy is gleaming with star clusters — 10 in all — each of which researchers examined in great detail. Their work is published in Nature.

"I didn't think it would be possible to resolve a galaxy that existed so early in the universe into so many distinct components, let alone find that its mass is similar to our own galaxy's when it was in the process of forming," said Lamiya Mowla, co-lead author of the paper and an assistant professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "There is so much going on inside this tiny galaxy, including so many different phases of star formation."