A little slat of land joined North and South America many million years ago, causing global repercussions. The Isthmus of Panama changed world climate and started a massive migratory experiment for plants and animals. How many million years did the Americas connect? According to a 2016 Science Advances paper (opens in new tab), the "standard model" dates it to roughly 3 million years ago, although more recent research indicate 6 million to 15 million years, with "an initial land bridge" as early as 23 million years ago. "It's still controversial," structural geologist Camilo Montes(opens in new tab) of the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, told Live Science. Panama's Isthmus appears. Tectonics created the Panamanian land bridge. Tectonic plates cover Earth's out...

On Saturday, the Alumni Stadium at Western University will be taken over by all things scientific as the university hosts its sixth Science Rendezvous. The free event is organized by university students and faculty and features over 40 interactive activities, stage performances, demonstrations, and pyrotechnics. Carly Charron, chair of the communications committee for Science Rendezvous and a PhD candidate in biology at Western, described it as "basically just a big festival where we have a bunch of different activities based in different areas of STEAM, so science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics." It's a day for children to come out and discover new things, investigate and learn, and participate in all these activities. Space Goo, Discovering DNA, Tornadoes an...

It is believed that the stratosphere, a layer of atmosphere above the Earth, is tranquil and peaceful. However, when scientists launched a solar-powered balloon between 10 and 50 kilometers above the earth's surface, they detected enigmatic sounds of unknown origin. The sounds, according to the Washington Post, are "infrasound" - inaudible to the human ear, just as infrared light is invisible to the human vision. When recorded with specialized equipment and sped up several thousand times, scientists were quoted as saying that it sounded like muted murmurs. Scientists distinguished these odd noises from normal zone sounds like ocean waves crashing. Siddharth Krishnamoorthy, a research technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, stated to the Post, "W...

A University of Minnesota Twin Cities team employed a novel method to determine the universe's expansion rate using data from a magnified, multiple-photographed supernova. Their findings may help scientists better estimate the universe's age and comprehend it. Science and The Astrophysical Journal published the two publications. Astronomy has two exact measures of the universe's expansion, dubbed the "Hubble constant." One uses local supernovae data, and the other uses the "cosmic microwave background," or radiation that began freely streaming across the cosmos shortly after the Big Bang. Physicists and astronomers have debated the 10% difference between these two readings. If both data are accurate, scientists' universe hypothesis is inadequate. "If new, independent measu...

The dinosaurs lost their dominance after an asteroid killed them. The animals that emerged 66 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch had huge shoes to fill, but they eventually did. In a research published May 11 in Science, ancient rhinoceros-like herbivores called brontotheres developed from dog-sized to elephant-sized in a short period. Brontotheres may have never achieved its maximum size before going extinct 34 million years ago owing to environmental changes. After the dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), mammals had less competition for resources, which experts believe helped them succeed as a family. Dinosaurs' extinction benefited Eocene megaherbivores. Brontotheres, one of the greatest victors, evolved ...

The recent news show that natural disasters continue to surprise us. Scientists and forecasters often see these occurrences coming, but not as early or in as much detail as they would want to deliver obvious, precise warnings. Scientists require environmental observations from multiple sources to understand, monitor, and anticipate natural hazards, their consequences on humans, and how they will evolve in the changing climate. Data must be gathered, accessible, timely, and reliable. Because of their global coverage, satellite-observed maps, graphs, models, and other data outputs are crucial [National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018]. A more open data-sharing infrastructure will attract more contributors Satellite data products help us study natural...

By taking an unorthodox approach to studying wildlife, researchers in New Mexico are giving previously deceased birds a second chance at life. In order to better understand how birds fly, researchers at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro are turning taxidermied birds into unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) so that they can observe the birds in flight. Artificial, mechanized birds did not produce the results that mechanical engineering professor Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian, who is leading this project, had hoped for. Hassanalian came to this conclusion after finding that artificial birds did not produce the desired results. He explained that his team had "come up with this idea that we can use… dead birds and make them [into] a drone." "We came up with this i...

A coronal mass ejection from the Sun is expected to strike Earth on Thursday as it travels through the inner planets at a speed of 3.6 million kilometers per hour (kmph). As the plasma collides with the Earth's strong magnetic field, it is anticipated to produce a G3-class geomagnetic storm and bright auroras. The impact of a CME on Earth depends on a number of factors, including the CME's speed and trajectory, as well as the magnetic fields' intensity and orientation. If the CME is directed toward Earth and its magnetic fields are aligned with those of Earth, the impact could be more severe Magnetic fields of the CME interact with the Earth's magnetic field to produce geomagnetic disturbances. When these magnetic fields collide, they can create electrical currents in the ionosph...