The newly-discovered isotope, plutonium-227, has a half-life of 0.78 seconds, according to a team of physicists from China. “The magic numbers of protons and neutrons, such as 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, ...

In a new study, astronomers compared high-resolution images of Uranus from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to the more-distant view from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Their results may serve as ...

Paleontologists have described three new enantiornithine birds from the Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, two of which represent new avisaurid species. These birds lived alongside dinosaurs 68 million ...

A team of biologists in Israel has grown an extinct — or at least extirpated — tree species of the myrrh genus Commiphora from an ancient seed found in the northern Judean Desert in the 1980s. The ...

The venom of black widow spiders contains a cocktail of seven specific latrotoxins, but only one — α-latrotoxin — targets vertebrates, including humans. Chemists at the University of Münster have now ...

New research by paleontologists from the University of Leicester, the University of Birmingham and Liverpool John Moores University demonstrates an unexpectedly high degree of variation in the hands ...

Xibalbanus tulumensis, a venomous remipede found in anchialine caves on the Yucatán Peninsula, is the only crustacean for which a venom system has been described. “Venomous animals inject their toxic ...

A team of marine biologists led by a Florida International University researcher has described a new species of the shark genus Sphyrna from the Caribbean and the Southwest Atlantic. Named for the ...

Fungus-farming ants cultivate multiple species of fungi for food, but the history of fungus-ant co-evolution is poorly known. In a new study published this week in the journal Science, researchers ...

Centaurs are former trans-Neptunian objects that have been moved inside Neptune’s orbit by subtle gravitational influences of the planets in the last few million years, and may eventually become short ...

Prior studies found signs of ice in the permanently shadowed regions near the south pole of the Moon, including areas within Cabeus, Haworth, Shoemaker and Faustini craters. A new analysis of data ...

Play is a widespread behavior present in distant species that, in its social form, relies on complex communication. Playful communication has been largely neglected in marine mammals. In new research, ...