History & Archaeology
Megalodon's mortal attack on sperm whale revealed in ancient tooth
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(Artwork by Tim Scheirer; Acta Palaeontologica Polonica (2021); CC BY 4.0)
Millions of years ago, an ancient sperm whale had a very, very bad day when a megatoothed shark — possibly the fearsome Otodus megalodon or its ancestor Otodus chubutensis, the largest predatory sharks that ever lived — viciously attacked it in what is now North Carolina, a new study suggests.
Marks from the attack, preserved as gouges out of the sperm whale's tooth, are the first evidence in the fossil record that megatoothed sharks tussled with sperm whales, the researchers said.
Full Story: LiveScience (8/23)
Natural Disasters
Astronauts and satellites watch Hurricane Henri from space as US Northeast braces for storm
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(NASA/Megan McArthur)
As parts of the U.S. northeast brace for Hurricane Henri to make landfall in New York today (Aug. 22), astronauts and satellites are tracking the historic storm from space.
Henri, which reached category 1 hurricane status on Saturday, is forecast to make landfall on Long Island, New York by midday today, dropping torrents of rain on Connecticut and Rhode Island, according to the National Hurricane Center's morning update. Astronauts on the International Space Station spotted Henri from orbit on Saturday. "We just flew over the East Coast and saw Hurricane Henri," NASA astronaut Megan McArthur wrote on Twitter while sharing a photo of the storm from space. "Stay safe friends."
Full Story: LiveScience (8/22)
Life’s Little Mysteries
Is the ancient Egyptian 'mummy's curse' real?
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(Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images)
Within months of the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, the man who financed its excavation — George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon in England — became ill and dropped dead. It didn't take long for people to question whether a "mummy's curse" had doomed the earl.
"Pharaoh's 3,000 year-old Curse is Seen in Illness of Carnarvons" read the headline on the front page of the March 21, 1923, edition of "The Courier Journal," a newspaper published in Louisville, Kentucky. Is there any evidence supporting the concept of a mummy's curse?
Full Story: LiveScience (8/23)
Math & Physics
Traversable wormholes are possible under certain gravity conditions
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(Shutterstock)
Interested in scooting through a wormhole, the ultimate cheat-code through space and time? Perhaps you'd like to hop from star system to star system across the universe without breaking a sweat? But first, you'd better make sure your wormhole is traversable.
"Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses," João Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, told Live Science. Rosa is attempting to virtually "build" a stable, traversable wormhole, one that can be safely crossed without the theoretical passageway collapsing or trapping its occupant. And he has recently found that it is indeed possible, but only if we tweak our understanding of gravity.
Full Story: LiveScience (8/23)
Your Health
How a Salmonella outbreak ravaged a Michigan restaurant for 11 years
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Mystery object in space could be a new arm of the Milky Way
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(NASA/Adler/U. Chicago/Wesleyan/JPL-Caltech)
Astronomers have discovered an enormous new filament of gas and dust hanging at the outer edge of our galaxy. Nicknamed "Cattail," the feature is not yet fully mapped, and the team who found it believe it could be a previously unknown arm of our Milky Way galaxy.
The Milky way is a giant spiral galaxy, which has a central bulge surrounded by coiling arms containing stars, gas and dust. Our home galaxy has four known spiral arms — two major arms named Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus, and two minor arms squished between them named Norma and Sagittarius, according to NASA. Earth is on a branch of the Sagittarius arm named the Orion Spur.
Full Story: LiveScience (8/23)
Curious Creatures
Tortoise hunts baby bird in slow-motion, crushes its skull in shocking video
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(Anna Zora, Frégate Island Foundation)
In shocking new video footage, a giant tortoise creeps toward a baby bird perched on a log, slowly and steadily cornering the chick before chomping down on its tiny skull.
The footage ends after the lifeless bird tumbles to the ground, but the researcher who captured the video reported that the tortoise swallowed the chick whole moments later. The chilling video is the first documented case of "deliberate hunting" in any tortoise species, the researchers wrote in a report published Monday (Aug. 23) in the journal Current Biology.
Full Story: LiveScience (8/23)
These flesh-eating centipedes hunt and eat baby birds alive. Here's why.
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(Daniel Terrington via Luke Halpin)
Giant, carnivorous centipedes on a South Pacific island can kill and eat up to 3,700 seabird chicks every year, a new study has revealed.
Phillip Island centipedes (Cormocephalus coynei) are ferocious beasties, growing up to nearly 1 foot (30 centimeters) long, clad in armored plates along their segments and equipped with a potent venom that they inject into unwitting victims through pincer-like "forcipules."
Full Story: LiveScience (8/22)
