A team of geologists has found for the first time evidence that two ancient, continent-sized, ultrahot structures hidden beneath the Earth have shaped the planet’s magnetic field for the past 265 million years. These two masses, known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), are part of the catalog of the planet’s most enormous and enigmatic objects.
A new chatbot designed by scholars can outperform PhD students and postdocs in undertaking scientific literature reviews, according to a Nature study that says the large language model (LLM) is capable of producing reliable summaries for less than a penny. Evaluating a new model designed to stop ChatGPT’s frequent “hallucinations” when it conducts literature reviews, US
Supermassive new theory on what lies at the heart of our galaxy The Times The mass distribution in and around the Local Group Nature Dark matter, not a black hole, could power Milky Way’s heart Phys.org Why Nearby Galaxies Are Fleeing Us: Scientists Finally Solve a 50-Year Mystery SciTechDaily A huge cloud of dark matter may be lurking near
Astronomers have yet to fully grasp the Galactic Center—the heart of the Milky Way—although they’re fairly certain that Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole, exists and dictates the cosmic objects in its vicinity. But a new study proposes the black hole might not be as influential as we believe. Instead, the dominant force in charge
While we have sent probes billions of kilometers into interstellar space, humans have barely scratched the surface of our own planet, not even making it through the thin crust. Information about Earth’s deep interior comes mainly from geophysics and is at a premium. We know it consists of a solid crust, a rocky mantle, a
io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Death Echoes Overlapping” by Megan Chee. Enjoy! Death Echoes Overlapping By Megan Chee On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to
You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light you shine at it: Optical light illuminates a material’s surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a material’s radiating heat. Now, MIT physicists have used terahertz light to reveal inherent, quantum vibrations in a superconducting material, which have
For decades, astronomers have been watching WOH G64, an enormous heavyweight star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. This star is more than 1,500 times larger than the Sun and emitting over 100,000 times more energy. For a long time, red supergiant WOH G64 looked
Do you like your space movies marinated in misery? Then you’re in the right place, because we’ve rounded up the ten bleakest space movies of all time. It’s satisfying when the evil empire gets its comeuppance, but there’s a grim appeal to sci-fi that wallows in the worst. Why? In part, it’s the acknowledgement that
Imagine being a cougar in Yellowstone National Park in the northern USA. Until the mid-1990s, you were the area’s top predator and could take down the abundant elk – herbivores very closely related to European red deer – almost at will. Then something changed. Wolves were reintroduced and have slowly increased in number. Over time,