Sunday, 7 September 2025

Early penguins may have used dagger-like beaks to skewer prey

 

Ancient relatives of penguins diversified quickly after the Cretaceous mass extinction event. Image courtesy of Mark P. Witton/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Some Darwinists think  that in the evolution of birds, the early ones used to skewer other birds, eating them.

Four new fossil species from New Zealand illustrate the striking diversity of the earliest penguins, which possessed long, dagger-like beaks they may have used to skewer prey.

The new discoveries “provide a stunning glimpse into the earliest evolution of penguins”, says Gerald MaThe fossils were unearthed from the Waipara Greensand formation in Canterbury, New Zealand, which contains rock dating back to between 62 and 58 million years old. The formation is well-known for holding some of the earliest bird species that flourished and diversified after the supposed mass extinction event that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs  according to the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany.

By Taylor Mitchell Brown 2025 Early penguins may have used dagger-like beaks to skewer prey | New Scientist 4 September


Saturday, 6 September 2025

Possible galaxy spotted by JWST could be the earliest we've ever seen

 

The possible galaxy in an image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, CEERS, G. Gandolfin the.ir view

Joel Kontinen

A possible galaxy named Capotauro may have formed within 90 million years of the big bang – but astronomers can’t be sure that’s what it is.

Would this be the first galaxy, evolutionists keep on asking. In their view, it appeared sometime after the big bang some 13.8 million years ago.

Astronomers might have discovered a galaxy that formed extremely early in the universe, nearly 200 million years before its closest competitor, but they caution there could be other explanations too.

Giovanni Gandolfi at the University of Padua in Italy and his colleagues probed data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look for distant objects that formed early in our universe’s 13.8-billion-year history.

The further away a galaxy is from Earth, the longer its light will have taken to reach us and the more it will be shifted to the red end of the spectrum by the expansion of space, a property known as redshift.

Source: 

Jonathan O’Callaghan 2025 Possible galaxy spotted by JWST could be the earliest we've ever seen | New Scientist 5 September

Thursday, 4 September 2025

Just 1 minute of vigorous exercise a day could add years to your life

 


Briefly walking up a steep hill counts as exercise. Image courtesy of Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Exercise could add years to your life.  This is the conclusion some scientists have just made.  

People who do several very short bouts of strenuous activity each day are much less likely to die in the next few years than those who do not exercise at all.

If you don’t exercise for the sake of exercising, doing five or six vigorous activities, each lasting just 10 seconds or so every day, can make a big difference. A study in the US has found that people who did a total of just over 1 minute of vigorous activity each day were much less likely to die of any cause in the following six years than those who did none.

Only around 15 per cent of adults exercise regularly, says Emmanuel Stamatakis at the University of Sydney in Australia. “The majority of tyears he adult population find it hard, or they’re not keen, or they’re not able to integrate regular exercise in their day-to-day routine.”

Source:

Michael Le Page 2025 Just 1 minute of vigorous exercise a day could add years to your life | New Scientist 1 September 

  

Wednesday, 3 September 2025

Newly discovered bus-size asteroid will zoom close past Earth today — and will not return for exactly 100 years

 

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL

Joel Kontinen

A bus-sized asteroid zoomed past Earth yesterday.

A bus-size asteroid, first spotted just over a week age, will zoom past Earth today (Sept. 3). The space rock will not get this close to us again until Sept. 4, 2125 — almost 100 years to the day.

The asteroid, dubbed 2025 QV5, was first spotted on Aug. 24. It is approximately 35 feet (11 meters) across, or around the same width as a school bus is long, and is hurtling toward us at more than 13,900 mph (22,400 km/h), according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Asteroid Watch.

The space rock will make a close approach to Earth on Wednesday, passing within 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) of our planet — or around twice as far away from us as the moon, according to JPL's Small-Body Database Lookup.

2025 QV5 has a roughly circular orbit around the sun, circling our home star every 359.4 days. During this time, it drifts between the orbits of Earth and Venus as it is subtly pulled from side to side between the two planets. As a result, it is unlikely to ever hit us. And even if it did, it is too small to be considered "potentially hazardous" and most of its material would likely burn up in the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, scientists are still keen to learn as much as they can about the space rock, and it has been listed as a target for NASA's Goldstone radar telescope in Barstow, California — which specializes in tracking and imaging near-Earth asteroids — over the coming days.

2025 QV5's orbit around the sun takes it close to Earth and Venus. For the majority of the next century, the asteroid will fly by the latter more often. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)

Source:

Harry Baker 2025 Newly discovered bus-size asteroid will zoom close past Earth today — and will not return for exactly 100 years | Live Science 2 October

 

  


Tuesday, 2 September 2025

Armoured dinosaur's 'crazy' spikes weren't just for defence

 

A life reconstruction of Spicomellus afer, an ankylosaur fossil discovered in Morocco. Image courtesy of Matthew Dempsey

Joel Kontinen

A 165-million-year-old ankylosaur from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco was covered in an array of extreme armour including body spikes fused to its skeleton, a feature never seen in any dinosaur before

When Adam and Eve sinned, the world turned around. The animals that could protect themselves  at times grew plates and spines so they would not be killed.

A dinosaur fossil found in Morocco may be the most bizarrely and elaborately armoured vertebrate that has ever walked the planet.

The first fossil of Spicomellus afer was discovered in Morocco and reported in 2021. It was only a rib fragment with fused spikes, suggesting that it belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs. These short-limbed, wide-bodied herbivorous dinosaurs are characterised by their covering of plates and spines.

Then, in October 2022, a farmer in the badlands of Morocco’s Middle Atlas mountains began to excavate a much more complete Spicomellus skeleton. That fossil has now been dated to 165 million years ago, in the Jurassic Period. The creature was probably about 4 metres long and weighed up to 2 tonnes.

Armoured dinosaurs such as stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, like modern crocodiles, had bony plates that sat in the skin called osteoderms. But in the Spicomellus fossil, there are two different types of bony armour: osteoderms and spikes that are actually fused to the bone.

“It’s unheard of among armoured dinosaurs, and indeed anything that has osteoderms, which is totally crazy,” says Susannah Maidment at the Natural History Museum in London, a member of the team that analysed the fossil.

In total, the Spicomellus specimen has dozens of armoured spikes covering almost its entire body. Some spikes attached to a neck collar are nearly a metre in length. There are also fused vertebrae in the tail, indicating that it may have been a fierce weapon.

The creature was so bizarre, says Maidment, that she “ran out of hyperboles to describe it”. “You can’t use words like ‘crazy’ in a scientific paper, and I kept using words like extreme and elaborate,” she says. “Then one of my colleagues suggested another way of trying to get across the unusualness of this thing was to describe it in the study as ‘baroque’.”

Such extreme armour would have severely limited the species’ capacity to navigate its environment and would have made living anywhere with dense vegetation almost impossible, says Maidment. “It would have just kept getting stuck everywhere,” she says.

The armour is so complex that the researchers think it had another function in addition to defence, such as to attract mates. “Things that appear to be totally impractical in the fossil record almost invariably relates to sex in some way or other. And so, you know, we think it is most likely to be some sort of display.”

By James Woodford 2025 Armoured dinosaur's 'crazy' spikes weren't just for defence | New Scientist 27 August 


Sunday, 31 August 2025

Long-lost sailback shark rediscovered after more than 50 years

 



An adult female sailback houndshark. Image courtesy of  Jack Sagumai et al. (2025)

Joel Kontinen

Some sharks have been hidden for more than 50 years but now it has been found in Papua New Guinea.

The rare sailback houndshark, which has an unusually large dorsal fin, was first described by scientists in 1973. That was the last record of its existence, until now.

Adorned with a curiously large and deep dorsal fin, the sailback houndshark (Gogolia filewoodi) was first described by scientists in 1973, when a pregnant female shark was caught in Papua New Guinea’s Astrolabe Bay, near the Gogol River. This single animal remained the only record of the species for decades.

Jack Sagumai at the World Wildlife Fund-Pacific in Papua New Guinea and his colleagues were gathering fisheries data directly from local communities as part of a project supporting the country’s National Plan of Action on Sharks and Rays. In March 2020, they received quite the surprise: photographs of multiple small sharks caught near the mouth of the Gogol River, all under a meter long and with a pronounced dorsal fin.

Source: 

Jake Buehler 2025 Long-lost sailback shark rediscovered after more than 50 years | New Scientist 26 August

 


Saturday, 30 August 2025

Evolutionists believe they are unlocking how frozen microbes stay alive for 100,000 years

 

Some Archaea microorganisms can survive in extreme conditions inside Siberia. Image courtesy of Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Microbes found buried deep in Siberian permafrost may be able to survive over extremely long timescales using protein repair genes

Microbes isolated from Siberian permafrost appear to have remained alive for more than 100,000 years, based on an analysis of their DNA. Their genetic overlap with other species suggests such astonishingly long lifespans may be widespread among the closest living relatives of all organisms with complex cells.

Other microbes have been isolated from extremely ancient marine sediments – some more than 100 million years old – but it remains unclear whether individual organisms can survive over those stretches of time. “I can’t run an experiment that long,” says Karen Lloyd at the University of Southern California. “[Time] is the weirdest variable to work with.”

 Source:

James Dinneen 2025 We are unlocking how frozen microbes stay alive for 100,000 years | New Scientist 25 August