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Astronomers have spotted an asteroid the size of nearly eight football fields, with the help of the largest digital camera in the world and a new space observatory. Asteroid 2025 MN45 measures about a half mile in diameter and is the fastest spinning asteroid of its size ever recorded. The team from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and United States Department of Energy (DOE) presented their findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Spin speed matters To spot this asteroid, the [...]

Giant sloths used to roam all over North America. Over 10 times bigger than today's sloths , many lived on the ground instead of in the trees and their closest living relatives are actually armadillos and anteaters. The largest of these ancient animals were those in the genus Megatherium –roughly the size of a modern Asian bull elephant and weighed about 8,000 pounds. But how did they grow so large–and why did they shrink down? A new analysis of over 400 fossils found that [...]

A new 113-million-year-old ant fossil was discovered preserved in limestone in Brazil. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter While there could be thousands of billions of ants crawling around the Earth today, few match the fiercity of the extinct “hell ants” of the Cretaceous period . From the subfamily Haidomyrmecinae , these ants had highly specialized jaws similar to a scythe–a horn-shaped tool used to cut grass or accessorize a grim reaper costume. The jaws were [...]

Dinosaurs certainly didn’t benefit from the Chicxulub asteroid impact, but that was a wholly different story for the ancestors of today’s ants. In fact, the climatic upheaval that rocked Earth 66 million years ago may be the major reason some of the insect species learned to farm millions of years before humans even evolved. In a study published on October 3 in the Science, an international team of researchers from Brazilian and US universities as well as the Smithsonian [...]

The sounds are inaudible to the human ear, and may be a way to thwart off hungry predators. Amphibians are known for their bright colors and their low and bellowing croaks that often announce when it is going to rain . Other frogs may make sounds that humans can't even hear. These sounds are also potentially pretty violent. A study published April 4 in the journal Acta Ethologica describes how some amphibians in South America potentially emit sounds on the ultrasound spectrum to defend [...]

A Japanese and Brazilian team of scientists found a funky new jellyfish with a distinguishing mark. The St. George's cross medusa ( Santjordia pagesi or S. pagesi ) is a new medusa jellyfish species that was found about 2,664 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean. It lives in a deep-sea volcanic structure called the Sumisu Caldera . This hot, hydrothermally active caldera is about six miles across and is located off the coast of Japan's Ogasawara Islands, about 285 miles south of the capital [...]

Nicknamed the “Earth’s lungs” for its dense oxygen producing forests, the Amazon can absorb 132 billion tons of the planet’s carbon. However, more than 30,000 square miles of the Amazon have been lost since the 1970s. Deforestation, clearing land for agriculture, and climate change fueled wildfires have severely taken its toll on the region, where about 10,000 acres of forest (almost the size of California) has been destroyed every day since 1988. However, there is [...]

Scientists have discovered a ring system around a small object beyond the orbit of Neptune, a surprising discovery in itself. But the observation comes with a mystery to boot: How is this ring system possible when, by all accounts, it shouldn’t exist? The ring in question orbits Quaoar, a small dwarf planet that lies more than 6.5 trillion miles from the sun—roughly 44 times the distance between Earth and our star. Detecting a dense ring around such a small, distant object was no [...]

This article was originally featured on Popular Photography. If you thought the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was impressive, think again. With a fresh $205 million in funding secured to accelerate its construction, the Giant Magellan Telescope is poised to be the most powerful telescope… ever. It will be used to hunt for habitable planets, study the first galaxies of the universe, and attempt to explain mysteries like dark matter and energy. Giant Magellan Telescope receives [...]