Enigmatic lizards somehow survived near Chicxulub asteroid impact

 

A yellow-spotted tropical night lizard (Lepidophyma flavimaculatum)

Image courtesy of Dante Fenolio/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Lizards are not dinosaurs. but somehow the dinosaur eating catastrophe that happened some 66 million years old did not affect these lizards. They may have been present some 66 million years ago.

The night lizards may have been the only terrestrial vertebrates that survived in the region of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs

A small, secretive group of lizards that still exists today may have been the only terrestrial vertebrates that survived in the vicinity of the Chicxulub asteroid collision, which led to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.

It has long been known that xantusiid night lizards are an ancient lineage that have persisted for tens of millions of years. But Chase Brownstein at Yale University and his colleagues suspected that the group may have actually arisen earlier than previously thought: in the Cretaceous Period, which ended around 66 million years ago.

The end of the Cretaceous was marked by a giant asteroid strike in the vicinity of Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, which left a crater over 150 kilometres wide and caused the extinction of most of the animal and plant species across the world.

Brownstein and his team used previously published DNA sequence data for xantusiids to create an evolutionary tree for the group. They combined this with skeletal anatomy across living and fossil night lizards, allowing the team to determine how old their lineages are and estimate how many offspring the ancestral night lizards would have produced.

They found that the most recent common ancestor of living xantusiids emerged deep within the Cretaceous, over 93 million years ago, and they probably only had clutches of one or two offspring.

“I think it is very possible that these ancient populations were as close or closer to the impact site than those today,” says Brownstein. “It’s almost as if xantusiid distribution sketches a circle around the impact site.”

Based on fossil evidence, it is unlikely that the ancient night lizards simply recolonised the region later on, says Brownstein.

“We know from our reconstructions that the common ancestor of living species was almost certainly living in North America, where the fossil record of xantusiids is pretty much fairly continuous on either side of the boundary layer marking the impact,” he says.

Many night lizard species live in rock crevices and their slow metabolisms are comparable to those of other survivors of the mass extinction, such as turtles and crocodiles. “This, perhaps, would have allowed them to take shelter during the impact and its immediate aftermath,” says Brownstein.

Nathan Lo at the University of Sydney says the lizards are remarkable. “They lived in the region around the asteroid’s point of impact, [yet] they managed to survive, even though the asteroid would have wiped out organisms that were within hundreds of kilometres of the impact point.”

They managed this despite not having many of the usual traits that we would expect to see in survivors of mass extinctions. “The species that tend to survive through these extinction events are those that are small in size, reproduce quickly and that have large geographic ranges,” says Lo. “But these lizards generally reproduce slowly and seem to have quite small ranges.”

 Source: 

James Woodford 2025 Enigmatic lizards somehow survived near Chicxulub asteroid impact | New Scientist 25 June 

Sea spiders 'farm' methane-eating bacteria on their bodies

 

Image courtesy of Biance Dal Bó

Joel Kontinen

Could a sizable amount of methane be harmful for us and the world? Now it seems that a Sea-spiders species kills off methane. This was probably brought off by intelligent design that want to keep us going strong.

Spider-like creatures living near methane seeps on the seafloor appear to cultivate and consume microbial species on their bodies that feed on the energy-rich gas. This expands the set of organisms known to rely on symbiotic relationships with microbes to live in these otherworldly environments.

Shana Goffredi at Occidental College in California and her colleagues collected sea spiders – marine arthropods named for their resemblance to arachnids – living near three different methane seeps in the Pacific Ocean. They found three previously unknown species from the sea spider genus Sericosura that appear to be abundant only near these gas seeps.

Other types of sea spiders that don’t live near seeps largely eat other invertebrates. But the researchers found the new sea spiders appear to get most of their nutrition by eating a distinctive set of bacterial species that live on their bodies. These bacteria harvest energy by metabolising methane and methanol coming from the seeps, energy that would otherwise be inaccessible to the sea spiders.

The researchers found the bacteria were confined to the spiders’ exoskeletons like a “microbial fur coat”, growing in what Goffredi describes as “volcano-like” clusters. The layers of bacterial growth also had markings like lawnmower tracks where the spiders may have munched on them using their hard “lips” and three tiny teeth.

To confirm the sea spiders really were eating the bacteria, the researchers also used a radioactive labelling technique to track how the carbon in methane was consumed by the sea spiders in the lab. “We watched that methane go into the microbes that are on the surface of the spiders, and then we watched that carbon molecule move into the tissues of the spider,” says Goffredi.

Source:

James Dinneen 2025 Sea spiders 'farm' methane-eating bacteria on their bodies | New Scientist 20 June

Can space rock around Venus collide with Earth?

 

Image courtesy of ESA

Joel Kontinen

An 'invisible threat': Swarm of hidden 'city killer' asteroids around Venus could one day collide with Earth, simulations show

Could a killer asteroid one day collide with Earth? According to a new study, it could. This bring to mind the killer asteroids mentioned in the book of Revelation: “The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.” Rev. 8:10-11.

Researchers think there are more hidden space rocks lurking around Venus. All but one of the planet's known co-orbitals have eccentricities greater than 0.38, meaning they have very elongated trajectories around the planet. This suggests there is an observational bias, likely because objects with lower eccentricities are probably being obscured by the sun's glare.

Co-orbitals can also move around relative to Venus, which can change their chances of colliding with Earth in the future. Previous research has shown that this likely happens to the space rocks once roughly every 12,000 years — known as a co-orbital cycle.

We know that Earth is not 12,000 years old so there is a problem which this.  

Source:

Harry Baker 2025 An 'invisible threat': Swarm of hidden 'city killer' asteroids around Venus could one day collide with Earth, simulations show | Live Science June 4

 

 

Australian moths use the stars as a compass on 1000-km migrations

 

Image courtesy of Dr. Ajay Narendra/Macquarie University, Australia

Joel Kontinen

Bogong moths are the first invertebrates known to navigate using the night sky during annual migrations to highland caves

Can the Australian moth use the stars to reach a destination that is a thousand kilometres away?

The answer seems to be Yes, they can. This is according to the latest research.   

An Australian moth that migrates over 1000 kilometres to seek respite from summer heat is the first known invertebrate to use the stars as a compass on long journeys.

Every spring, billions of bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) travel from various parts of southern Australia to cool caves in the Australian Alps after spending the winter as caterpillars feeding on vegetation. Once in the caves, they have a long period of inactivity, called aestivation, before returning to their breeding grounds.

It has long been a mystery exactly how these moths, whose numbers have been collapsing in recent years, navigate so far to these high country caves, says Andrea Adden at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Previous studies have shown that they are able to use Earth’s electromagnetic field, but only in combination with landmarks they can see. Adden and her colleagues wanted to find out what other cues the moths may be using to navigate.

“If you go to the Australian bush, where these moths live, and look around at night, one of the most striking visual landmarks is the Milky Way,” she says. “We know that daytime migratory insects use the sun, so testing the starry sky seemed an obvious thing to try.”

To do so, the team caught moths during their migration using light traps and took them to a lab. There, the insects were placed in a Perspex arena and an image of the night sky was projected onto a screen above them. The moths were tethered inside the arena but could pick a flight direction based on the sky image. The researchers used a device called a Helmholtz coil to essentially cancel out Earth’s magnetic field.

The tests showed that the moths use a stellar compass, says team member Eric Warrant at Lund University, Sweden. “When tethered moths were placed under highly realistic local starry night skies, they flew in their inherited migratory direction,” he says. “They did this solely with the help of these stars – all other visual cues, as well as the Earth’s magnetic field, were absent.”

When the team turned the starry sky by 180 degrees, moths flew in the opposite direction, and when they randomly redistributed the natural stars across the image they were completely disoriented.

In a second experiment, the moths were fixed in place with a very thin electrode inserted in their brains. This revealed changes in the moths’ neural activity when the projected sky image was rotated.

Although dung beetles use the Milky Way to stay on the same bearing over short distances, no insect was known to use celestial navigation for migration until now.

“The bogong moth is the first invertebrate we know of that is able to use the stars as a compass for long-distance navigation to a distant destination that it has never previously been to,” says Warrant. “Only humans and some species of night migratory birds are known to have this ability.”

Another insect famous for long-distance migrations, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), uses the sun to navigate, factoring in the time of day.

It may be that intelligent design has given these moths the way to use the start and the worlds electromagnetic field to do this.

Source:

 James Woodford 2025 Australian moths use the stars as a compass on 1000-km migrations | New Scientist 18 June 

Aussie living fossil conundrum

Joel Kontinen

Living creatures often look much the same as their fossil counterparts supposedly living millions of years ago, earning the label ‘living fossils’.

Some evolutionists say the environment (and thus selection pressures) musts have stayed the same for all that time. But the ‘environment’ also includes the predators and prey supposedly evolving all around it.

Others conveniently claim that if only we had the fossil’s DNA, we would realize it only looks the same despite having evolved greatly.

A recent article listing an array of Australian living fossils said, ‘Australia’s isolation has allowed many such species to flourish, shielded from external pressures that influenced global evolution. “I.e., they were spared many environmental changes.

Except that, one sentence before, it has living fossils in general “often surviving environmental changes that drove others to extinction.” So, on the one hand, their geography shielded them from environmental change, On the other, they survived huge environmental change. Evolution is clearly very flexible, capable of explaining many an outcome. Only it helps not to have two contradictory explanations in the one paragraph.

The biblical creation/Flood/dispersion explanation is much more straightforward.

Source:

Weber,C., The living fossils of Australia: these ancient creatures defy evolution, msn.com, 8 Mar 2025

 

Israel strikes Iran

 

 Image courtesy of IsraeliPM

WWII Bomber Plane P-38 Found 300 Feet Below the Ice in Greenland

 

Glazier Girl. Image courtesy of Sgt. Ben Bloker, public domain.

Joel Kontinen


A World War II airplane that was lost in Greenland has been spotted by an aerial drone.

On July 4, 2018 California businessman Jim Salazar told the wrecked P-38 was beneath “more than 300 feet (91 meters) of ice using a ground-penetrating radar antenna fitted to a heavy-lift aerial drone.”

“This latest find echoes the 1992 recovery of another P-38 fighter from the same ‘Lost Squadron’ of U.S. warplanes in Greenland. That fighter was eventually restored to flying condition under the name ‘Glacier Girl’.

Both aircraft were part of a group of two B-17 bombers and six P-38 fighters flying from the U.S. to Britain in July 1942. They were traveling through a chain of secret airbases in Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland known as the Snowball Route.

Hundreds of U.S. aircraft flew this route during World War II as part of Operation Bolero, which delivered warplanes, pilots, equipment and supplies for the planned Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.”

This brings to nought the geological sediments, which are thought to be millions of years old.

Source:

Metcalfe, Tom, 2018. 'Lost Squadron' WWII Warplane Discovered Deep Beneath a Greenland Glacier. Live Science (August 25).

Giant phantom jelly: The 33-foot-long ocean giant that has babies out of its mouth

 

Image courtesy of  Antony Gilbert

Joel Kontinen

Giant phantom jellies were discovered in 1899 and since then have only been spotted around 120.

Giant phantom jelly (Stygiomedusa gigantea) lives on the oceans except the Arctic Ocean. It eats plankton and small fish.  

Why it's awesome: Earth's oceans are home to many secretive and unusual creatures that humans rarely see — including giant phantom jellies. These elusive deep-sea creatures have a 3.3-foot-wide (1 meter) bell and four ribbon-like arms that grow up to 33 feet (10 m) long, making them among the largest invertebrate predators in the ocean.

The first giant phantom jelly specimen was collected in 1899 and described in 1910. The species has only been spotted around 120 times since. This is because these jellies generally live in deep waters, down as far as 22,000 feet (6,700 m) below the surface.

They have compressible, squashable bodies, which help them to survive the incredibly high pressures they experience at these depths.

In 2022, researchers observed giant phantom jellies on three separate occasions during submersible expeditions in Antarctica, with videos and images showing the creatures swimming at relatively shallow depths of between 260 and 920 feet (80 to 280 m). In a study reporting the sightings, researchers said it's likely the jellies live closer to the surface in high southern latitudes because seasonal variations in sunlight may drive prey closer to the surface.

According to evolution, all species are connected to each other. 

Source:

Lydia Smith 2025 Giant phantom jelly: The 33-foot-long ocean giant that has babies out of its mouth | Live Science January 25

Evolutionists think they are getting close to recreating the first step in evolution of life

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock/nobeastsofierce

Joel Kontinen

Life is thought to have begun when RNA began replicating itself, and researchers have got close to achieving this in the lab.

Could mankind  do the impossible, create life from almost nothing? 

The goal of understanding how inert molecules gave rise to life is one step closer, according to researchers who have created a system of RNA molecules that can partly replicate itself. They say it should one day be possible to achieve complete self-replication for the first time.

RNA is a key molecule when it comes to the origins of life, as it can both store information like DNA and catalyse reactions like proteins. While it isn’t as effective as either of these, the fact that it can do both means many researchers believe life began with RNA molecules that were capable of replicating themselves. “This was the molecule that ran biology,” says James Attwater at University College London.

But creating self-replicating RNA molecules has proved difficult. RNA can form double helices like DNA and can be copied in the same way, by splitting a double helix in two and adding RNA letters to each strand to create two identical helices. The problem is that RNA double helices stick together so strongly that it is hard to keep the strands separate for long enough to allow replication.

Now, Attwater and his colleagues have found that sets of three RNA letters – triplets – bind strongly enough to prevent the strands rezipping. Three is the sweet spot, says Attwater, as longer sets are likely to mispair. So, in the team’s system, an RNA enzyme in double-helix form is mixed with triplets.

The solution is made acidic and warmed to 80°C (176°F) to separate the helix, allowing the triplets to pair up and form the “rungs” of the double helix. The solution is then made alkaline and cooled to -7°C (19°F). As the water freezes, the remaining liquid becomes highly concentrated and the RNA enzyme becomes active and joins up the triplets, forming a new strand.

“RNA nucleotide triplets serve very specific informatic functions in translation in all cells,” says Zachary Adam at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This paper is interesting because it might point to a purely chemical role – a non-informatic function – for RNA nucleotide triplets that they could have served prior to the emergence of a living cell.”

Source:

Michael Le Page 2025 We’re getting close to recreating the first step in evolution of life | New Scientist 28 May 

Fossils show puzzling lack of evolution during last ice age peak

 

Image courtesy of chrisstockphotography/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Thousands of fossils from  the La Brea tar pits in California show no signs of mammals and birds evolving in response to shifting temperatures over the past 50,000 years

Is evolution happening today?  Well, it has not occurring in the mammals and birds in the past 50 000 years.  It probably has not occurred at all.   

Studies of tens of thousands of fossils from the La Brea tar pits in California have found no clear evidence of any of the species  to falling temperatures as ice sheets spread across the continent, or to the later warming when the glacial period ended.

“They’re not fluctuating with climate change like so many biologists believe that everything must do,” says Donald Prothero at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. “They’re static, despite obvious evidence obvious evidence of climate change at 20,000 years ago.”

This study couples evolution with climate change.

Source:

Michael Le Page 2025 Fossils show puzzling lack of evolution during last ice age peak | New Scientist 28  May 

New supergiant 'Darth Vanderi' sea bug discovered in South China Sea — and it's absolutely massive

 

Image courtesy of Peter Ng

Joel Kontinen

The giant isopod has been renamed Bathynomus vaderi due to its resemblance to Darth Vader's iconic helmet from "Star Wars."

Scientists have discovered a never-before seen isopods,

Bathynomus Valeri belongs to the genus Bathynomus — giant isopods that are abundant in cold, deep waters. It is a "supergiant," weighing over 1 kilograms  (2.2 pounds) and growing up to 32.5 centimeters (12.8 inches) long, making it one of the largest known isopods.

The species is named "vaderi" because its head resembles Darth Vader's iconic helmet from "Star".

For the new study, published Jan. 15 in the journal ZooKeys, the team examined samples caught by local fishers and found that a few specimens had distinctive physical features that marked them as a newfound species. The team described B. vaderi’s pronounced depression in its hip bone and a unique bony ridge protruding from its coracoid bone that distinguishes it from other supergiant isopods.

 Source:

Jacklin Kwan 2025 New supergiant 'Darth Vader' sea bug discovered in South China Sea — and it's absolutely massive | Live Science January 14

A bevy of Behemoth

Image courtesy of Mauricio Anton/Science Photo Library.

Joel Kontinen

Today, there are six species of sloths, all of which have similar ecologies such as arboreality and a slow metabolism. These species are a tiny remnant of a once diverse American clade that was mostly made up of large-bodied species. Some scientists think that across the evolutionary history of sloths the ancestral groups were terrestrial and large, with smaller species being derived and convergent.

According to evolution, for 30 million years, the sloth family diversified across the Americas, from a species as large as an elephant to one that was entirely aquatic. Unfortunately, like most other large Pleistocene herbivores, the clade was almost entirely eradicated by newly arriving humans.

Source:

Sacha Vignieri, 2025 In Science Journals | Science 23 May

Venus may be geologically 'alive' after all, reanalysis of 30-year-old NASA data reveals

 

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL

 Joel Kontinen

Is Venus geologically active? Some articles state that she is not, but new research points that this is not so.

The Solar System is especial, God created the planets with water and made it geologically active, that is seen in Pluto and Mars. 

New research strengthens the case that Venus, long considered a geologically stagnant world, may be more Earth-like in its internal dynamics than once believed.

Scientists have uncovered fresh evidence that Venus is not dead — geologically speaking. Venus and Earth are similar in size and were bombarded by comparable amounts of water billions of years ago. This shared This research has provided a new and important insight into the possible subsurface processes currently shaping the surface of Venus," Gael Cascioli, an assistant research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland who co-led the new study, said in a statement.

"We could hardly believe our eyes"

The latest evidence focuses on dozens of large, ring-shaped features on Venus' surface. These features, known as coronae, form when plumes of hot rock rise from deep within the mantle, pushing the crust upward. As the surface cools and collapses, a circular structure is left behind. Cascioli and his team simulated several formation scenarios for these features and compared their results with data from Magellan.

Origin has long fueled one of planetary science's biggest questions: Why did Venus become a hellish, uninhabitable world while Earth flourished into a cradle for life?

The predicted and actual data aligned so closely for some coronae that "we could hardly believe our eyes," Cascioli told Scientific American.

Of the 75 coronae they resolved in the Magellan data, 52 appear to sit above buoyant mantle plumes, according to the new study.

"We can now say there are most likely various and ongoing active processes driving their formation," Anna Gülcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who co-led the new study, said in the statement. "We believe these same processes may have occurred early in Earth's history."

Venus hosts hundreds of such coronae, many of which are found in areas where the planet's crust is particularly thin and heat from below is high. Recent research simulated how different rock types behave under Venus' extreme conditions. The findings suggest that the planet's crust may break off or melt once it reaches around 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick, and in many areas, it is likely even thinner.

"That is surprisingly thin, given conditions on the planet," Justin Filiberto, deputy chief of NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division in Houston, who co-authored the study about Venus' crust, said in a different statement.

Source:

Sharmila Kuthunur 2025 Venus may be geologically 'alive' after all, shocking analysis of 30-year-old NASA data reveals | Live Science 21 May

Weird planet is orbiting backwards between two stars

 

Image courtesy of Aaron Alien/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

After two decades of debate, research confirms that an odd binary star system has an equally odd planetary companion.

Some planetary systems do not look normal to us, How could you see a binary star system that has a planet between two stars, Space is wonderful and we should not see life on this planet.  

“After years of observation, researchers finally understand how a pair of stars can maintain a stable orbital dance with an elusive planet.

In 2004, David Ramm at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand spotted a mysterious repeating signal while observing the motion of a pair of stars in a system called Nu Octantis. This started a long debate on whether the signal was evidence that this system included a planet roughly twice the size of Jupiter, which some! physicists thought impossible because of the size and closeness of the two stars. Now, Ramm and Man Hoi Lee at the University of Hong Kong and their colleagues have offered the most conclusive evidence yet that Nu Octantis really is a threesome rather than a duo.”

Source: 

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan 2025 Weird planet is orbiting backwards between two stars | New Scientist 21 May 

 

Strange 'sticky' dark matter could be lurking in a distant galaxy

Galaxy SDSS J0946+1006 acts as a gravitational lens, helping astronomers see the signs of dark matter

Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/R. T. Treu/University of California/SLACS

Joel Kontinen

Dark matter is thought to only interact through gravity, which is why it is so difficult to spot, but now evidence is growing for a type of dark matter that can also stick to itself.

Evolutionists and those who believe in Big Bang may be welcoming this study with expectation for a non-theistic view of the world.

An unusually dense galaxy could be the first clear evidence for the existence of an unconventional form of “sticky” dark matter, altering our understanding of this mysterious cosmic substance.

In the standard picture of cosmology, so-called cold dark matter only interacts with the rest of the universe through gravity, which causes it to bunch together in invisible, puffy clouds around galaxies. We can map these clouds indirectly by measuring the gravitational pull they exert.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Strange 'sticky' dark matter could be lurking in a distant galaxy | New Scientist 19 May

Elephants have big ears, because of intelligent design

 

Image courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GFDL 1.2

Joel Kontinen

The ears of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can grow up to 2.01 metres (or 6 feet 6 inches). That’s about 17% of their body length, which means that while they’re the animal with the largest ears, they’re not actually the one with the largest ears relative to the size of their body. That award goes to the long-eared jerboa (Euchoreutes naso), but it's still impressive to have 6-foot-tall ears. So why are elephants' ears so big? There's a practical reason for their large size, experts say.

An animal that big generates a lot of heat, especially in the hot savannas, forests and grasslands where they live. But unlike humans, elephants don't really sweat, William Sanders, a vertebrate says. He is a paleontologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in fossil elephants. Instead, they have very little body hair and "spectacular cooling devices" — massive ears filled with large blood vessels that help the giant animals thermoregulate.

"When the animal gets really warm, it can force blood into its ears, and then it'll flap them," said Advait Jukar, an assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Elephant ears have thin skin that is only millimetres thick and the blood vessels that pass through them are large, enabling elephants to move about 20% of their blood supply through their ears at any one time.

The larger the ears are, the more surface area they have to release heat into the surrounding air. Because the blood flowing through them is warmer than the air, the heat dissipates into the elephant's surroundings. Cooler blood then circulates back into the body, helping to reduce the animal's overall temperature, Jukar told Live Science. The animals can expand or constrict their blood vessels depending on whether it's cool or hot, which helps regulate their temperature

Intelligentdesign has provided elephants with large ears so they will not get hot.

 Source:

Sara Hashemi 2025 Why do elephants have big ears? | Live Science 17 May

Exquisite new-to-science frog species has golden legs and odd habits

 

Image courtesy of Alexander Tamanini Mônico

Joel Kontinen

Can a tiny frog that has golden joints included in the Lazarus-animals scientists have found? Some frogs are tiny and yet they are still frog and they have not changed into something else, as evolution insists.  

Resplendent with its blue stripes and golden legs, this newly described poison dart frog may look imposing, but it is only about the size of a thumbnail, measuring just 14 to 17 millimetres from the tip of its snout to its derrière, or cloaca.

Esteban Koch at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil, and his colleagues found the frog in the forests of the Juruá river basin in Brazil in 2023 and went back to look for further specimens in 2024. The team has now officially described it and named the species Ranitomeya aetherea.

Little is known about the frog, but there are clues about its parental care system. Koch’s team hasn’t found any large groups of tadpoles, hatched from a big clutch of eggs. Instead, they have spotted only individuals, mainly in water-filled cavities where leaves join the stem on palm-like plants called Phenakospermum  guyannense.

The team saw one female deposit a single egg, which suggests that eggs are laid singly, as happens in some other poison dart frogs. “It’s possible that the female goes back when the tadpole is developing and lays another unfertilised egg, so that the tadpole can eat this to get energy,” says Koch.

The researchers don’t know how big the population of the frogs is, so can’t tell if it is endangered, but in the year between the two surveys, they saw there had been deforestation in the area they searched, which they accessed via a small plane and then an 8-hour boat trip on the river. “As the frog is really specific to this plant in this area, any small disturbance could be dangerous to the species,” says Koch.

Source:

 Chris Simms 2025 Exquisite new-to-science frog species has golden legs and odd habits | New Scientist 14 May

Scientists find hint of hidden liquid water ocean deep below Mars' surface

 

Image courtesy of NASA Goddard).

Joel Kontinen

There might be a hidden ocean's worth of liquid water below the surface of Mars, seismic evidence suggests. By studying seismic waves, researchers have found a layer deep beneath the surface of Mars that could contain enough liquid water to flood the planet with an ocean thousands of feet deep.

NASA has found evidence of Mars' water escaping into space — but new research hints that it may have alssso gone deep, deep underground. 

 Could there be water on Mars, beneath the surface.  This is what some creation scientists believe, as in Genesis it says that planets were formed with water, inside them. For instance, minor planet Bennu is full of water.

Some evolution-believers scientists say that below the surface, some 5.4 to 8 kilometres or 3.4 to 5 miles, there is water beneath the surface.

Some evolutionists say that our neighbouring planet was once abundant in water. In the time between Mars' formation 4.1 billion years ago to about 3 billion years ago, the Red Planet is thought to have been extremely wet, with features like valley networks, delta formations, and layered sedimentary rocks suggesting sustained water flow.

Source:

Jess Thomson 2025 Hidden signs of liquid water ocean found deep below Mars' surface | Live Science 24 May

Hoatzin: The strange 'stinkbird' born with clawed wings that appears to be an evolutionary 'orphan'

 

Image courtesy of Nature Picture Library/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

This weird blue-faced, red-eyed bird smells so bad predators won't eat it.

The bird with clawed wings that some evolutionists claimed is a descendant of dinosaurs. It ls found in  the Amazon and Orinoco river basins in South America. It lives   on leaves, fruits and flowers.

The hoatzin is often regarded as one of the world's strangest birds. Hatchlings are born with clawed wings — a rare, prehistoric trait— and adults give off a strong, unpleasant smell due to their cow-like, fermenting digestive system, earning them the nickname "stinkbird."

Hoatzin have some pretty weird traits, with mohican crests, blue facial skin, red eyes and large, fan-shaped tails, which they used to maintain balance while navigating dense vegetation.

But these tropical birds are most notable for their pungent odor, which is commonly compared to manure or rotting vegetation. This unpleasant smell is the result of a highly unusual digestive process that sets them apart from almost every other bird species.

Unlike most birds, the hoatzin has a foregut fermentation system, similar to the one found in cows. It primarily feeds on leaves, which it stores and ferments in a large, chambered crop — a temporary food storage pouch located in the esophagus. Then, the food is passed to the stomach for fermentation, where bacteria break down the tough plant material, releasing gases via burps that produce the bird's distinctive manure-like odor.

But it is not a descendant of dinosaurs, it is a living fossil.

Source:

Lydia Smith 2025 Hoatzin: The strange 'stinkbird' born with clawed wings that appears to be an evolutionary 'orphan' | Live Science 10 May

Was a famous supernova an alien invader from another galaxy?

 

Image courtesy of NASA/CXC/SAO/D.Patnaude

Joel Kontinen

Kepler’s Supernova, seen in 1604, is one of the most famous exploding stars ever seen, and now astronomers think it may have been an interloper from another galaxy

Could a supernova be an invader from outside our solar system? some revolutions are speculating on this, but space seems to be full of objects that we do not understand just like this supernova.

One of the most famous exploding stars ever recorded by humanity may have been an invader from another galaxy, according to a new analysis of its movements. What is more, alien stars like this might be behind 1 per cent of all the supernovae we see in the galaxy.

In 1604, astronomers saw a new, incredibly bright star appear in the sky, outshining any other. German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who also derived some of the first laws of planetary motion, observed the star for a year.

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Alex Wilkins 2025 Was a famous supernova an alien invader from another galaxy? | New Scientist 9 May