Three teams of astronomers have made use of SPHERE, an advanced exoplanet-hunting instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in order to shed light on the enigmatic evolution of fledgling planetary systems. The explosion in the number of known exoplanets in recent years has made the study of them one […]
Gray whales alter their calling behavior to compensate for increasing levels of noise to improve their chances of being heard by other gray whales. Hearing each other is key to whale survival. NOAA scientists Marilyn Dahlheim and Manuel Castellote found that the number of times a gray whale calls is adjusted depending on the […]
The hole in the Earth’s ozone layer that forms over Antarctica each September grew to about 8.9 million square miles in 2016 before starting to recover, according to scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who monitor the annual phenomenon. “This year we saw an ozone hole that was just […]
The oldest-known vocal organ of a bird has been found in an Antarctic fossil that is related to ducks and geese and lived during the age of the dinosaurs, more than 66 million years ago. The discovery of the Mesozoic Era vocal organ — called a syrinx — and its apparent absence in non-avian dinosaur […]