Paleontologists have described a new genus of small, bird-like dinosaur that lived in what is now New Mexico approximately 73 million years ago.
The post New Troodontid Dinosaur Genus Identified from Fossil Bone Found Decades Ago in New Mexico appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists working in southern China have identified a new species of sauropod dinosaur that appears to belong to a group never before documented anywhere in East Asia.
The post Fossil Find in China Reveals Dinosaur Family Never Before Seen in East Asia appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth—before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation.
There is no shortage of generative AI tools that already allow people to create AI-modified images of real buildings and cities based on user prompts. But Google’s aborted attempt to incorporate its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator as a Google Earth feature made it even easier for anyone to create modified versions of authentic imagery depicting real locations—something that Google boasted about when initially promoting the new feature.
“For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world,” wrote Bryan Horowitz, product manager for Google Earth, in a company blog post on July 30.
© Google Earth
Paleontologists have identified the earliest-known cephalopod equipped with a siphuncle -- a tubular extension of the mantle found in shelled cephalopods -- pushing back the fossil record of this key evolutionary feature to the Early Cambrian, roughly 520 million years ago.
The post 520-Million-Year-Old Fossil from China Fills Gap in Evolutionary History of Cephalopods appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
An international team of paleontologists has identified a new species of early sauropodomorph dinosaur in Zimbabwe, adding to growing evidence that southern Africa hosted a richer diversity of dinosaurs during the Late Triassic epoch than previously recognized.
The post New Species of Triassic Dinosaur Discovered on Shores of Zimbabwe’s Lake Kariba appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A set of 1.43-million-year-old fossil footprints preserved along the margin of an ancient lake in northern Kenya is offering paleoanthropologists new evidence about the size, gait and social lives of the beings who made them and reopening questions about which species they belonged to.
The post Ancient Footprints in Kenya Hint at Bigger Bodies and Group Behavior among Early Human Relatives appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Editor’s Note: Astrobites is a graduate-student-run organization that digests astrophysical literature for undergraduate students. As part of the partnership between the AAS and astrobites, we occasionally repost astrobites content here at AAS Nova. We hope you enjoy this post from astrobites; the original can be viewed at astrobites.org.
Title: The Rhythm of the ISM: Tracing the Timescales of Gas Evolution and Star Formation Across Galactic Environments
Authors: Zuzanna Kocjan and Vadim A. Semenov
First Author’s Institution: University of Maryland
Status: Published in ApJ
Stars are born in the interstellar medium (ISM) when cold, dense clouds of gas become unstable and collapse under gravity. Despite their plentiful reservoirs of gas, galaxies convert only a small fraction of this material into stars, making star formation a surprisingly inefficient process. A key factor behind this inefficiency is stellar feedback: radiation, stellar winds, and supernova explosions from young stars can inject energy and momentum into the surrounding gas, heating, stirring, and dispersing it. In this way, stellar feedback shapes future star formation across scales ranging from individual regions in the ISM to whole galaxies.
An important tool astronomers use to study star formation is the Kennicutt–Schmidt relation, which links the amount of gas in a galaxy to the rate at which stars form. More specifically, it relates the gas surface density, Σgas, to the star formation rate surface density, ΣSFR. (For more on this relation, see this Astrobites article on a classic research article.) However, this law is underpinned by a crucial ingredient: timescales. In particular, the pace of star formation depends both on how quickly galactic gas is cycled into star-forming material and on how rapidly those regions convert gas into stars once they form. Today’s article investigates the physical origin of star-formation scaling relations behind the Kennicutt–Schmidt law by building on a simple theoretical framework for the ISM.
In a given region of a galaxy, the ISM consists of gas in either an actively star-forming state or an inert, non-star-forming state, depending on whether it is dense and unstable enough to collapse (as illustrated in Figure 1). The transition of non-star-forming gas into the star-forming state occurs on the supply timescale, τ+. Conversely, the dispersal of star-forming gas back into a non-star-forming state is characterized by the removal timescale, τ–. As a helpful analogy, the authors compare this process to water boiling in a kettle: the ISM is continuously “boiling,” with gas moving between active and inactive states. Meanwhile, the total gas reservoir gradually decreases, analogous to water slowly evaporating as the kettle boils. The gas depletion time, τ*, therefore represents the timescale over which the available gas would be exhausted by star formation.
Figure 1: Schematic of the gas cycling framework used in the authors’ theoretical model for how gas is converted into stars, which takes into account a supply, removal, and depletion timescale. [Adapted from Kocjan and Semenov 2026]
To explore how gas and star formation are connected across different galactic environments, the authors analyze three simulated systems: a dwarf galaxy, a Milky Way–like galaxy, and a gas-rich starburst galaxy, as shown in Figure 2. Despite spanning very different physical regimes, the galaxies exhibit remarkably similar trends in the fraction of gas actively forming stars as a function of Σgas. This suggests that the amount of star-forming gas is governed primarily by local interstellar conditions, since regions with higher gas surface densities tend to contain denser, more strongly self-gravitating gas.
Figure 2: Using simulations (left to right) of an isolated intermediate-mass dwarf galaxy, Milky Way–like galaxy, and gas-rich galaxy, the authors measure the star-forming gas fraction versus the gas surface density (right). [Adapted from Kocjan and Semenov 2026]
Figure 3: Scaling relations between the supply (left), depletion (middle), and removal (right) times in kiloparsec-scale regions of the simulated galaxies (shown in different colors). Based on the measurements from the simulations, the authors introduce a parameterized model for the gas cycling framework, as defined in the equations. [Adapted from Kocjan and Semenov 2026]
Original astrobite edited by Jayde Willingham.
About the author, Shalini Kurinchi-Vendhan:
After studying astrophysics and literature at Caltech, I moved onto a Fulbright Fellowship in Heidelberg, Germany. I’m passionate about using computer simulations to explore supermassive black holes and galaxy evolution — but I also love poetry and traveling.
The post The “Rhythm” of the Interstellar Medium appeared first on AAS Nova.
The Guardian journalist who targeted the Free Speech Union with a story stuffed with misinformation, Aisha Down, is a "Senior Tarbell Fellow". Charlotte Gill investigates what that means.
The post The Guardian Journalist Who Targeted the Free Speech Union is a “Senior Tarbell Fellow”. What Does That Mean? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
What can some neon trapped in a chunk of rock tell us about Earth’s formation and the protosolar nebula? Quite a lot, as detailed in a recent study in The Planetary Science Journal.
By analyzing rocks pulled from mid-ocean ridges, geologists have concluded that there are tiny amounts of noble gases in the deep interior of Earth. That’s a strange statement upon reflection: how did these gases, which are famously apathetic to essentially all other elements, end up embedded within rocks thousands of kilometers underground? Since their passivity rules out the potential of a chemical reaction that formed them in place, they must have been in the mantle since the very beginning of Earth’s history.
A map illustrating the age of the seafloor. Mid-ocean ridges stand out clearly in red. By sampling material from these ridges, planetary scientists can infer the composition of Earth’s deep interior. Click to enlarge. [Mr. Elliot Lim, CIRES and NOAA/NCEI]
That last option is especially exciting to present-day planetary scientists interested in constraining Earth’s formation history because it requires some very specific conditions. Since light noble gases like neon don’t dissolve well in seawater, they must have dissolved into a magma ocean — meaning the nebula was still around when Earth was large enough to have a molten surface. That already restricts us to a very specific time in the solar system’s history, but it doesn’t say much about the specific size of the proto-Earth other than “big,” and it doesn’t say much about the state of the nebula other than “it existed.” Recently, Vincent Savignac and Eve Lee (University of California, San Diego; McGill University) successfully refined these constraints to pin down information about both the early Earth and the nebula that surrounded it.
Savignac and Lee began by growing a grid of infant Earths on their computers via models of gas accretion and atmosphere–magma interactions. Each simulation started with a different proto-Earth mass and nebular density, and each one yielded a different amount of neon in Earth’s deep interior. Excitingly, only a small handful of the scenarios tested ended up with values similar to those observed.
A schematic of Earth’s formation via embryo formation (when the noble gases enter the mantle) followed by mergers. Click to enlarge. [Savignac & Lee 2026]
Savignac and Lee demonstrated that these constraints are robust against the later stages of Earth’s evolution. In its later years, Earth either suffered or benefited from a giant impact, depending on your feelings about the Moon, but the researchers showed that this event doesn’t pose a problem for their models. Overall, this study builds a delightful link between rocks from our deep oceans and the particulars of Earth’s formation, demonstrating the unique power of planetary science to tie together different scientific fields.
“Constructing the Earth’s Formation History Using Deep Mantle Noble Gas Reservoirs,” Vincent Savignac and Eve J. Lee 2026 Planet Sci. J. 7 135. doi:10.3847/PSJ/ae64f7
The post Noble Gases Along for the Ride appeared first on AAS Nova.
Scientists discovered a rare planet larger than Jupiter orbiting a distant star once every 180 days. A planet nearly five times as massive as Jupiter circles a distant star once every 180 days. Known as NGTS-38 b, it is an exoplanet, meaning a world that orbits a star outside our solar system. NGTS-38 b is [...]Liopleurodon ferox is a short-necked marine reptile that patrolled the seas of what is now England and France some 163 million years ago.
The post Jurassic Pliosaur Liopleurodon Was Big, but Not as Big as Once Feared appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists in India have unearthed a partial skeleton of a diminutive, previously unknown neosauropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic rocks of Gujarat’s Kachchh Basin.
The post Small Sauropod Dinosaur from Jurassic Period Discovered in India appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A new genus and species of cryptobranchid salamander that lived in lakes in Japan about 3.5 million years ago has been identified from three fossil vertebrae, filling a major gap in the fossil record of one of the world’s oldest amphibian lineages.
The post 3.5-Million-Year-Old Fossil from Japan Reveals Lost Lineage of Giant Salamanders appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists in China have discovered what they say is the earliest confirmed pieces of amber ever found, a fossilized resin roughly 385 million years old (Middle Devonian epoch) that predates the previous record-holder by about 65 million years.
The post 385-Million-Year-Old Amber Found in China appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment reports that central Tibet’s rugged mountain architecture was not built in a single burst. Instead, it was shaped by long-lived crustal shortening that persisted after a major ocean closed during the Cretaceous period—when the Bangong–Nujiang Ocean shut down and the surrounding plates collided.
The research team, led by Zhang, Liu, Lin, and colleagues, examines how tectonic forces transferred through the region during and after ocean closure. Their central finding is that shortening did not simply end when the ocean vanished. Rather, the continental collision continued to drive deformation well beyond the immediate collision event, helping sustain mountain growth over extended geological time.
To reach this conclusion, the authors combine regional tectonic constraints with structural observations that reflect how stress and strain were distributed through the Tibetan crust. They interpret the evolving patterns of deformation as evidence for sustained compression, including the way different crustal levels responded to continued convergence.
The study frames the Bangong–Nujiang Ocean closure as a pivotal tectonic switch: once the ocean disappeared, the mechanical coupling between continental blocks increased. That change allowed compression to remain effective, promoting ongoing uplift and crustal thickening in central Tibet.
Importantly, the paper links this sustained shortening to the broader development of Tibetan topography. Rather than treating uplift as a short-lived response to a single collisional moment, the results support a scenario in which post-closure tectonics kept feeding the mountain belt for millions of years.
By addressing the timing and persistence of shortening, the work helps refine how geologists explain the thick crust beneath Tibet and the coexistence of active deformation with long-term structural inheritance. The authors suggest that the region’s growth reflects both the closure of an ocean basin and the prolonged geodynamic consequences of that closure.
The findings also carry implications for how future modeling efforts should represent continental collisions. They highlight that plate-tectonic reorganizations can create enduring mechanical conditions, sustaining deformation even after the most dramatic phase of convergence has passed.
With the DOI link and citation tied to the 2026 publication, the study—understood through its title and approach—offers a clear, data-driven narrative: central Tibet’s rise reflects sustained shortening following Cretaceous ocean closure, shaping a mountain system that kept growing long after the ocean was gone.
Subject of Research: Tectonics and mountain growth in central Tibet following the Cretaceous closure of the Bangong–Nujiang Ocean
Article Title: Sustained shortening following Cretaceous Bangong–Nujiang Ocean closure shaped central Tibetan mountain growth.
Article References: Zhang, B., Liu, S., Lin, C. et al. Communications Earth & Environment (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03830-3
Image Credits: AI Generated
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