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Astronomers May Have Found Supernova Remnant near Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

This composite image contains X-rays from Chandra and XMM-Newton missions (shown in blue) as well as radio data from the MeerKAT telescope (shown in red) in South Africa. These have been combined with an optical image from the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawai’i (red, green, and blue). Image credit: NASA / CXC / UCLA / Zhu et al. / ESA / XMM-Newton / PanSTARRS / MeerKAT / CSA / STScI / SAO / L. Frattare & P. Edmonds.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, astronomers identified a possible remnant of ancient stellar explosion just a few dozen light-years from Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.

The post Astronomers May Have Found Supernova Remnant near Milky Way’s Central Black Hole appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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New Species of Ancient Bear-Dog Identified in Spain

Paludocyon moyasolai. Image credit: Jesús Gamarra.

Paleontologists have identified a previously unknown species of amphicyonid -- the extinct family of carnivorous mammals popularly known as bear-dogs -- from two specimens unearthed at a rich fossil site in the Vallès-Penedès Basin near Barcelona, Spain.

The post New Species of Ancient Bear-Dog Identified in Spain appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Amazon’s Elusive Short-Eared Dog May Be More Common than Researchers Once Thought

The short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis) from a trap camera in Bolivia. Image credit: G. Ayala & M.E Viscarra.

Hundreds of camera-trap records from Bolivia and Peru suggest the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), one of the world’s least-known canids and one of Latin America’s least-known carnivores, may be thriving in intact upland forests.

The post Amazon’s Elusive Short-Eared Dog May Be More Common than Researchers Once Thought appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Scientists Capture First-Ever Images of Cozumel Dwarf Fox

This image of a dwarf gray fox (Urocyon sp.) was captured on the island of Cozumel, Mexico: an adult male is shown partially concealed behind foliage before capture by the Fundación de Parques y Museos de Cozumel on September 14, 2023; this represents the first photograph ever taken of the species on the island and the first reported sighting since 2001. Image credit: Rafael Chacón.

Researchers have obtained the first-ever photographs of the Cozumel dwarf fox (Urocyon sp.), an elusive dwarf fox living on the Caribbean island of Cozumel, off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Captured in September 2023, the images provide the first confirmed evidence since 2001 that the elusive animal still survives on the island.

The post Scientists Capture First-Ever Images of Cozumel Dwarf Fox appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Study: Cave Lions were Distinct Species that Occasionally Bred with Ancestors of Today’s Lions

Cave lions painted in the Chauvet Cave, France.

The extinct Eurasian cave lion (Panthera spelaea) and today’s African and Asian lions (Panthera leo) belong to separate evolutionary lineages that diverged roughly 1.7 million years ago -- far earlier than previously thought, according to an analysis of 12 cave lion genomes spanning more than 100,000 years.

The post Study: Cave Lions were Distinct Species that Occasionally Bred with Ancestors of Today’s Lions appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Schrödinger’s Cat Gets Stranger: Physicists Demonstrate Quantum States No One Has Seen Before

Quantum mechanics defies classical intuition, most famously through Schrödinger’s cat, where systems exist in superpositions of opposing states. Such superpositions are central to quantum technologies. Quantum ‘cat’ states have been realized in harmonic oscillators, but implementations were largely limited to Fock, displaced, or Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states. A different class of macroscopic superpositions, where an oscillator is squeezed along orthogonal axes so that its positional variance is simultaneously larger and smaller than the Heisenberg limit, was proposed previously but remained unrealized. Saner et al. introduce a trapped-ion hybrid spin-oscillator system enabling an experimental realization of these ‘siblings’ of Schrödinger’s cat. Image credit: Saner et al., doi: 10.1103/k1xk-yt42.

Physicists at the University of Oxford have engineered a new class of ‘cat states’ -- quantum superpositions constructed not from ordinary wave packets, but from deeply exotic, nonclassical components -- opening unexpected paths toward more resilient quantum computers.

The post Schrödinger’s Cat Gets Stranger: Physicists Demonstrate Quantum States No One Has Seen Before appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Earth’s Earliest Animals May Have Thrived Too Easily to Evolve

Artist’s reconstruction of the Fractofusus community: the bottom right features a large Fractofusus around which there are 5 to 8 medium specimens clustered; each of the medium specimens also has small specimens clustered around them; the small specimens therefore form an independent double cluster pattern, namely clusters of clusters. Image credit: C.G. Kenchington.

Fossils from some of the oldest-known animals on Earth, dating from 574 million years ago (Ediacaran period), suggest that cloning, not competition, dominated the Ediacaran seas, slowing evolution until environmental stress helped drive the rise of sexual reproduction and a burst of biodiversity.

The post Earth’s Earliest Animals May Have Thrived Too Easily to Evolve appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Lunar Meteorite Preserves Evidence of Colossal Asteroid Strike

XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts; sulfur (S) highlights the location of cracks and terrestrial weathering. Image credit: Crow et al., doi: 10.1130/G54386.1.

Planetary scientists analyzing a lunar meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 12593 have uncovered evidence of an asteroid impact that occurred 3.5 billion years ago on the Moon, helping to reconstruct a period of intense bombardment that left lasting marks across the inner Solar System.

The post Lunar Meteorite Preserves Evidence of Colossal Asteroid Strike appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Fossil Discovery in Patagonia Reveals New Species of Horned Turtle

An artist’s impression of Patagoniaemys aeschyli. Image credit: Nawel Vazquez / Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales ‘Bernardino Rivadavia’ / CONICET.

Paleontologists have identified a new species of meiolaniform turtle from northern Patagonia, Argentina, that lived during the Maastrichtian age, just before the asteroid-triggered mass extinction that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs.

The post Fossil Discovery in Patagonia Reveals New Species of Horned Turtle appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Spanish Cave Sanctuary Reveals More Than 11,500 Years of Activity

Sala Keimada, a chamber of Cueva Palomera in Burgos, Spain. Image credit: Ortega-Martínez et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105818.

New radiocarbon dates from Sala Keimada, a hard-to-reach chamber of Cueva Palomera in the province of Burgos, northern Spain, suggest that generations of people returned to the sacred space from the end of the Ice Age through the Iron Age, leaving behind art, structures and offerings.

The post Spanish Cave Sanctuary Reveals More Than 11,500 Years of Activity appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Astronomers Scan Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS for Alien Radio Signals

This image from the Subaru Telescope shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Image credit: NAOJ.

Using the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, a 42-element radio interferometer at Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, California, astronomers probed 3I/ATLAS for artificial radio transmissions but found only human-made interference.

The post Astronomers Scan Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS for Alien Radio Signals appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Ornithologists Describe New Bird Species from Remote Indonesian Islands

The cheerful fantail (Rhipidura laguceria) in November 2022. Image credit: James A. Eaton.

A small songbird inhabiting the Babar Islands, in the Banda Sea, Indonesia, has been identified as a new species after a duo of researchers discovered that its distinctive song sets it apart from its closest relative.

The post Ornithologists Describe New Bird Species from Remote Indonesian Islands appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Acheulean Toolmakers Chose Their Stone with Surprising Precision

A reconstruction of Homo longi in his habitat. Image credit: Chuang Zhao.

Geochemical analysis of 780,000-year-old stone tools from Israel suggests Acheulean (or Acheulian) hominins repeatedly sought specific basalt sources, revealing sophisticated planning and deep knowledge of their landscape.

The post Acheulean Toolmakers Chose Their Stone with Surprising Precision appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Astronomers Finally Find Milky Way’s Missing Black Hole Wind

This image shows the evidence for the wind blowing away from Sagittarius A*: the white dot in the center of the image shows the supermassive black hole; in orange is data from ALMA, mapping the location of cold gas composed of carbon monoxide in the image; in blue is X-ray data from Chandra; a large cone-shaped cavity, visible as an absence of cold gas in the ALMA data, is filled by hot X-ray-emitting gas in the Chandra data. Image credit: NASA / CXC / UMass / Wang et al. / ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Longmore et al. / Minniti et al.

After a 50-year search, astronomers have uncovered evidence that Sagittarius A* -- the 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole that resides at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy -- is blowing a hot cosmic wind into its surroundings, carving out a giant cavity near the Galaxy’s heart.

The post Astronomers Finally Find Milky Way’s Missing Black Hole Wind appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Geoscientists Find Vast Fan-Shaped Structure beneath Antarctica’s Ice

Fault-controlled basins and interpreted structural frame in the newly-identified East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province. Image credit: Armadillo et al., doi: 10.1038/s41561-026-01991-6.

By combining seismic, gravity and topographic data, a team of researchers from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom found that several well-known subglacial basins in East Antarctica are part of a single fan-shaped province whose origins trace back to ancient continental stretching.

The post Geoscientists Find Vast Fan-Shaped Structure beneath Antarctica’s Ice appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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After Decade-Long Hunt, Scientists Find East Asia’s Tallest Tree

The Heaven Sword tree. Image credit: Chia-Chun Hsu et al., doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2026.1746112.

Deep in the mountains of northern Taiwan, a towering Taiwania cryptomerioides -- a large coniferous tree in the cypress family Cupressaceae whose ancestors date back 100 million years -- has been confirmed as the tallest known tree in East Asia.

The post After Decade-Long Hunt, Scientists Find East Asia’s Tallest Tree appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Fish Fossils from Early Paleocene Fill 10-Million-Year Gap after Dinosaur Extinction

Marine fishes from the Early Paleocene site of Qreiya 3 in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Image credit: Ian Baylatry.

Paleontologists have described an assemblage of marine fish fossils from the 62.2-million-year-old site of Qreiya 3 in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, providing a window into this transition.

The post Fish Fossils from Early Paleocene Fill 10-Million-Year Gap after Dinosaur Extinction appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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Jupiter Accelerates Electrons to Near-Light Speed, Offering Clues to Cosmic Ray Origins

As planets and stars travel through the streams of charged particles flowing across space, their magnetic fields act like obstacles; incoming particles are slowed and deflected, forming a boundary called the bow shock; just ahead of this boundary lies the foreshock, a variable region where magnetic conditions can accelerate some particles to nearly the speed of light. Image credit: Ben C. Smith, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

The giant planet’s bow shock isn’t just deflecting the solar wind, it’s acting as a powerful particle accelerator, firing electrons to relativistic energies of at least 1 MeV, according to a new analysis of data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

The post Jupiter Accelerates Electrons to Near-Light Speed, Offering Clues to Cosmic Ray Origins appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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