NATURE - Budget pressures at NASA, specifically arising from the increasing costs of several planetary science mission programmes, have rendered the Venus orbiter VERITAS as collateral damage. Currently on subsistence funding, mission scientists worry about the impact of ongoing delays on Venus exploration. Perpetually shrouded by dense, toxic clouds and sizzling with temperatures hot enough...
INDY100 - A 'white gold' mine containing $540 billion in treasures has been discovered at the bottom of a giant lake in Southern California. The Salton Sea, which is the largest lake in the US state was being studied by scientists as part of research funded by the Department of Energy. The study aimed to...
POPULAR SCIENCE - Geologists have discovered 10 new species of trilobite in a relatively unstudied area of Thailand. These extinct sea creatures were hidden for 490 million years and are helping scientists create a new map of the animal life during the late Cambrian period. They are described in a monograph that was published in...
NEWSWEEK - Researchers have uncovered the fossils of numerous extinct sea creatures that lived hundreds of millions of years ago—and they could help solve an ancient geographical puzzle, according to a recently published study. The fossils represent various types of a strange class of prehistoric marine animals known as trilobites. A team of scientists collected...
IFLSCIENCE - The humble trilobite may be long-extinct, but even as fossils, there’s much they can teach us about the history of our planet. In fact, ancient arthropods – including 10 newly discovered species – that lived nearly half a billion years ago could provide the missing pieces to the puzzle of where Thailand fitted...
SPACE.COM - Like huge playground bullies, planets like Jupiter can be "agents of chaos" around other stars, a pair of new studies suggest. Gas giant planets that are the size of Jupiter or larger create havoc in young planetary systems, often shoving smaller, Earth-sized planets way out of their original, circular orbits, according to the...
FORBES - Massive planets like Jupiter—now at its brightest and best in the night sky—can prevent Earth-sized planets from becoming Earth-like by upsetting their orbits and destroying climates. In other star systems, gas giants can play a much more destructive role. As an example, the authors studied HD 141399, a star system also with four...
THE DEBRIEF - New stellar models predict that gas giant planets can act as ‘agents of chaos’ in their solar systems by wreaking havoc on the habitable zone orbits of Earthlike planets that may harbor alien lifeforms. Our solar system’s gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, help protect the inner rocky planets, including Earth, from potentially...
EARTH.COM - In the cosmic game of planetary billiards, giant gas planets can act as colossal wrecking balls, effectively pushing their Earth-like counterparts out of the stable zones that might harbor life. Two recent papers dive into this concept further, investigating the roles of giant gas planets in two distinct star systems. What they reveal...
SCIENCE FRIDAY - Sixty-six million years ago when an asteroid slammed into what is now the Yucatan peninsula, it set off a period of near global darkness for almost two years. Scientists think a majority of land species went extinct during that time, but what was going on in the planet’s oceans? And how were...