OMG science

OMG science

Astronomers say the space rock, called 2026 JH2, is up to four times the size of a London bus and will get 'as close as you can without hitting'. It is expected to zoom by our planet at an estimated distance of around 56,000 miles (90,000km) late on Monday night. This is exceptionally close - the equivalent of just a quarter of the distance between us and the moon.

Researchers in China have analysed proteins from the tooth enamel of six fossils dating back around 400,000 years five men and one woman found at sites across much of the country from north to south. They were able to recover two proteins, and one of them the M273V variant of the enamel protein ameloblastin is key. The results show that this protein is present in all the fossils analyzed, which belonged to our ancestor Homo erectus.

I ended up printing out a picture of an Irish friendship ring. Even while I was presenting it, it just felt like a total lie because I had no connection to it. I just wanted the assignment to be over. She managed to meet her family on a three-day layover in South Korea, on the way back to the US from Guam on a research trip.

Somebody should get Bob," says one of the crew as soon as it becomes clear, even on their low-resolution black-and-white monitor, that they're looking at man-made objects on the sea floor. And well they should have: the Bob in question is oceanographer and Argo inventor Robert Ballard, who'd been actively thinking about how to find the Titanic since at least the early nineteen-seventies and boarded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's R/V Knorr with intent to find it.

“This fluid connection is evidence that the fault boundary of the Kafue Rift is active. 'Therefore, the Southwest African Rift Zone is too - and may be an early indication of the break-up of sub-Saharan Africa.'”

Around 66 million years ago, a six-mile (10km)-wide space rock called Chicxulub smashed into Mexico. The impact famously wiped out the dinosaurs, caused worldwide devastation and changed the course of history. The collision released a huge dust and soot cloud that partially blocked out the sun and caused temperatures to plummet - and in the years that followed, it wiped out more than 50 per cent of all animal and plant species on Earth.

Back in 2003, when he was at Oxford, Bostrom penned an influential philosophical paper with the incredible title of “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Loosely speaking, his argument was that sufficiently advanced civilizations will eventually build sophisticated simulations of their own ancestors - and that, given enough time in the simulation, those simulated beings will develop their own simulation inside the simulation, where a new set of simulated ancestors will do the same thing, ad infinitum.

The special sky colourings, caused by solar particles colliding with Earth's magnetic field, could be more visible than usual in the UK this week, according to experts, thanks to a recent powerful blast from the Sun.

During the expedition's first ten days, the ship navigated a strong storm, with ocean swells reaching two to three metres. Still, the sights were remarkable. "Lot of good remote birds!" the scientist texted friends. Then one of them sent him a link to a news story about an outbreak of a hantavirus, a potentially deadly pathogen traditionally carried by rodents, which had been reported on a cruise ship. "Please tell me you're not on this ship," the friend wrote.

Scientists called it trinitite. Now researchers have identified a new material within trinitite called a clathratea cagelike chemical lattice that traps other atoms inside it. It's a completely new kind of clathrate crystal—something never seen before in nature or in the products of a nuclear explosion, says Luca Bindi, a geologist at the University of Florence in Italy, who is co-author of a new study detailing the finding.

Experts have discovered foetuses 'catch' yawns from their mothers and have been seen slowly opening and closing their mouths. As part of a study, they recorded the facial expressions of pregnant women while an ultrasound machine captured real-time images of their foetuses' faces. By comparing the two records, the researchers found that foetuses were more likely to yawn after their mothers did, with a delay of around 90 seconds.

However, when it comes to the objects beyond Saturn, including the Uranian and Neptunian systems, as well as everything that lies in the Kuiper belt and beyond, the only probes we've ever sent their way are Voyager 2, which flew by Uranus and Neptune in the late 1980s, and New Horizons, which flew past Pluto in 2015.

The clip, filmed in 1978 for the landmark BBC series Life on Earth: A Natural History, demonstrates what has become Attenborough's trademark over his 70-year career: the communication of new, surprising and complex phenomena by showing rather than telling. There's no lecture here - just curiosity, mischief and arresting visual impact.

Many books describe how the first atomic bomb was built. But this history by Emily Seyl stands apart. It tells the story of the bomb's Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945 through restored photographs from the Los Alamos National Laboratory's National Security Research Center, where Seyl works. These include images of once-clandestine documents and experiments, as well as unfamiliar restored photographs of 'trinitite' - green glass found at the test crater - which fell from the bomb's fireball in molten drops.