While earthquakes are common on our planet, the phenomenon seems to be an occurrence beyond Earth, with definitive signs of seismic activity having been found decades ago on both the Moon and Mars.

It has been known for decades that the moon experiences quakes and just this year, the seismic phenomenon was detected on the red planet by NASA's InSight mission.

The lander has recently mapped about two quakes a day and researchers have managed to attribute the most massive marsquakes to a location known as Cerberus Fossae, located about 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) east of InSight.

Previously, there were signals indicating a fault system, and now the assumptions have been proved true by scientists, as the region has appeared to be very active.

About 790,000 years ago, a meteor slammed into Earth with such force that the explosion blanketed about 10% of the planet with shiny black lumps of rocky debris. Known as tektites, these glassy blobs of melted terrestrial rock were strewn from Indochina to eastern Antarctica and from the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific. For more than a century, scientists searched for evidence of the impact that created these pitted blobs.

But the crater's location eluded detection — until now.

Geochemical analysis and local gravity readings told researchers that the crater lay in southern Laos on the Bolaven Plateau; the ancient impact was concealed under a field of cooled volcanic lava spanning nearly 2,000 square miles (5,000 square kilometers), the scientists reported in a new study.

When a meteor hits Earth, terrestrial rocks at the impact site can liquefy from the intense heat and then cool into glassy tektites, according to the Jackson School Museum of Earth History at The University of Texas. Scientists can look at the abundance and locations of tektites to help locate an impact, even if the original crater is eroded or concealed, the study authors wrote.

In this case, there were plenty of tektites — so where was the crater?

"Overlapping codes are demonstrably present in our DNA," Evolution News noted here recently. "Proponents of intelligent design have long identified overlapping genes as a signature of design." Yes, but not just a signature, as Stephen Meyer says in an interview with a Polish ID group, the En Arche Foundation (starting at 4:36):


Overlapping genes, or "nested coding," was anticipated by microbiologist Siegfried Scherer, as Meyer points out. Why? Because human coders layer codes on top of codes, for various reasons including improved storage. Therefore a designing agent, operating behind the veil of biology, would likely do so as well. And so it is.

NASA has captured an extremely crisp infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Spanning a distance of more than 600 light-years, this panorama reveals details within the dense swirls of gas and dust in high resolution, opening the door to future research into how massive stars are forming and what's feeding the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's core.

Among the features coming into focus are the jutting curves of the Arches Cluster containing the densest concentration of stars in our galaxy, as well as the Quintuplet Cluster with stars a million times brighter than our Sun. Our galaxy's black hole takes shape with a glimpse of the fiery-looking ring of gas surrounding it.

The new view was made possible by the world's largest airborne telescope, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA. Flying high in the atmosphere, this modified Boeing 747 pointed its infrared camera called FORCAST - the Faint Object Infrared Camera for the SOFIA Telescope - to observe warm, galactic material emitting at wavelengths of light that other telescopes could not detect. The image combines SOFIA's new perspective of warm regions with previous data exposing very hot and cold material from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory.

An overview paper highlighting initial results has been submitted for publication to the Astrophysical Journal. The image was presented for the first time at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting this week in 2020 in Honolulu.

Scientists have discovered a new form of brain activity related to how cells process information. The incredible find suggests our brains might be even more powerful than previously thought, according to the team.

The new research, conducted by German and Greek scientists and published in Science, centers on signals sent and received by the ends of neurons, known as 'dendrites.' The information passed by these parts of the brain is key to how the organ decides subsequent actions.

Some astronomers believe that Jupiter, instead of protecting Earth from dangerous comets and asteroids, is actively flinging objects into the inner solar system. New research now demonstrates this complex process in action.

A popular theory suggests Jupiter, with its tremendous mass, acts like a gigantic shield in space, sucking in or deflecting dangerous debris left over from the formation of the solar system. That makes sense, but the Jupiter Shield theory, as it's known, has been falling out of favour over the past two decades.

A leading critic of this theory, Kevin Grazier, formerly of the West Point U.S. Military Academy and NASA, has sought to debunk this idea for years. He has published several studies on the subject, including a 2008 paper titled, "Jupiter as a Sniper Rather Than a Shield." Indeed, with each successive paper, Grazier has increasingly demonstrated the ways in which Jupiter, instead of being our protector, is actually — though indirectly — a pernicious threat.

Grazier's latest foray into the subject involves a pair of companion papers, one published in the Astronomical Journal in 2018 and the other in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Journal in 2019. The first paper takes a look at the complex ways in which objects in the outer solar system are affected by the Jovian planets, namely Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, while the second paper looks at a specific family of icy bodies and how they're transformed by Jupiter into potentially deadly comets. Looking at the findings of the two papers, it seems the Jupiter Shield theory is in serious jeopardy.

"Actually, I wouldn't say that it's in jeopardy — I would say that it has been laid to rest." Grazier told Gizmodo in an email. "Our simulations show that Jupiter is just as likely to send comets at Earth as deflect them away, and we've seen that in the real solar system."

To be clear, this was a very good thing when the Earth was young, as comets and asteroids delivered the essential ingredients required for life. Today, however, these impacts are most certainly not good, as they could trigger mass extinctions similar to the one that extinguished non-avian dinosaurs some 66 million years ago.

Our magnificent gravitational wave astronomers have done it again, adding to the detection collection a new collision between two neutron stars. On 25 April 2019, two neutron stars around 520 million light-years away came together and merged into a single object.

It's called GW190425, and although it's only the second such collision astronomers have ever seen, it's already broadening our understanding of these colossal cosmic smash-ups.

"The source of GW190425 represents a previously undetected type of astrophysical system," the researchers wrote in their paper, submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and not yet peer-reviewed.

The first binary neutron star collision event was detected in August 2017, and it provided a glorious abundance of data across a range of observation media - what is known as multi-messenger astronomy.

For more than a decade, astronomers across the globe have wrestled with the perplexities of fast radio bursts — intense, unexplained cosmic flashes of energy, light years away, that pop for mere milliseconds.

Despite the hundreds of records of these enigmatic sources, researchers have only pinpointed the precise location of four such bursts.

Now there's a fifth, detected by a team of international scientists that includes West Virginia University researchers. The finding, which relied on eight telescopes spanning locations from the United Kingdom to China, was published Monday (Jan. 6) in Nature.

At a time when kombucha is commonplace on cafe menus and "probiotic-fortified" has become the newest health buzzword, our guts have never been more relevant. With good reason, humans have begun paying more attention to the bacteria living in our guts — our microbiomes. The microbiome helps fight disease and aid digestion, playing a pivotal role in many creatures' wellbeing, from canines to primates to rodents. But for the first time — largely in part due to museum collections — scientists were able to compare the guts of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians alike. It turns out that not all species rely so heavily on their gut microbiomes. In fact, birds and bats have oddly similar microbiomes, and neither appear to rely on them much. "Why?" you may ask: to accommodate their ability to fly, scientists think.

"If you're carrying a lot of bacteria in your gut, it can be pretty heavy and may take resources away from you," says Holly Lutz, a research associate at Chicago's Field Museum and postdoctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego. "So if you're an animal that has really high energetic demands, say because you're flying, you may not be able to afford to carry all those bacteria around, and you may not be able to afford to feed them or deal with them."

Single human neurons may be much more powerful computational devices than once thought, according to a new study that identifies previously unknown electrical activity in neural dendrites.

At the end of a neuron, tree-like appendages called dendrites send and receive electrochemical signals, which play a critical role in how the brain compiles information to determine its next actions. The results published in the Jan. 3 issue of Science unveil unexpectedly complex electrical activity in the dendrites of human pyramidal neurons, which may help uniquely boost the processing power of the human brain, allowing us to understand and solve complicated problems.

Neurologically speaking, the physiology that makes the human brain so particularly special and capable remains poorly understood. One possibility may lie in the thickness of the human brain's cortical layers, particularly layers 2 and 3, which contain a disproportionate amount of brain matter compared to other species as well as numerous neurons with large and elaborate dendritic trees.