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Ever wonder what might happen if a python ate a porcupine? Well, wonder no more. One of these giant snakes — which kill prey by suffocating it and then consuming it whole — recently dined on a porcupine and didn't live to brag about it. On June 14, a cyclist riding along one of the mountain bike trails at the Lake Eland Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, spotted a very engorged snake. The cyclist snapped a few photos of the gluttonous python and posted them to social media, where they quickly attracted the attention of locals who wanted to...

The incredible discovery was made in South Africa, around 150 km west of port Maputo. There, we find the remains of a huge metropolis that measures, according to tests, around 1500 square kilometers. This ancient city is, according to researchers, part of an even larger community with about 10,000 square kilometers and is believed to have been constructed 160,000 to 200,000 years before Christ. The region is somewhat remote and the "circles" have often been encountered by local farmers who assumed they were made by some indigenous people in the past. But, oddly, no one ever bothered to inquire about...

Title: Cajon Pass, CA Description: Cajon Pass, CA, where high pressure gas lines, high voltage power lines, rail lines, fiber optics, water lines, and Interstate 15 all run over the San Andreas Fault, which runs roughly side to side across the center of this image. Location: Cajon Pass, CA, USA Date Taken: Oct 10 2008 Photographer: Don Becker Photographer Email: becker@usgs.gov Photographer Organization: U.S. Geological Survey Title: Utilities on San Andreas Fault Description: Directly on the San Andreas with high pressure gas lines underground and high voltage power lines overhead at Cajon Pass, CA Location: Cajon Pass, CA, USA Date...

Look up, and somewhere in the western portion of the sky right now, or anytime in the next several weeks, an hour or so after sunset, and you'll see two very bright "star-like" objects. The brighter of the two (by a lot) is Venus, the other Jupiter. Venus, slightly smaller than Earth is currently about 51 million miles away. Jupiter, roughly 12 Earth diameters across, 560 million.

Sweet Tooth Causes Some Major Side Effects On your Brains! June 24, 2015 If you love your fried, fatty foods smothered in chocolate and generously dusted with icing sugar? Then, you might just have to say goodbye to mental acuity.A new research conducted in Oregon State University has revealed that a high-sugar, high-fat diet can drastically modify your gut bacteria which in turn may lead to significant losses in ‘cognitive flexibility’ – a measurement of the brain’s ability to switch between thinking about one concept to another, and to adapt to changes in the environment.The study, which was conducted on...

Explanation: What bizarre alien planet is this ? It's planet Earth of course, seen through the shimmering glow of aurorae from the International Space Station. About 400 kilometers (250 miles) above, the orbiting station is itself within the upper realm of the auroral displays, also watched from the planet's surface on June 23rd. Aurorae have the signature colors of excited molecules and atoms at the low densities found at extreme altitudes. The eerie greenish glow of molecular oxygen dominates this view. But higher, just above the space station's horizon, is a rarer red band of aurora from atomic oxygen. The...

Explanation: Stars trail above and urban lights sprawl below in this moonlit nightscape from Cape Town, South Africa, planet Earth. The looming form of Table Mountain almost seems to hold terrestrial lights at bay while the stars circle the planet's South Celestial Pole. This modern perspective on the natural night sky was captured in June 2014, the scene composed of over nine hundred, stacked 30 second exposures. The stunning result was chosen as the winner in the Against the Lights category, a selection from over 800 entries in The World at Night's 2015 International Earth and Sky Photo Contest.

Schematic phase diagram of hydrogen. The figure shows the four known solid phases I to IV and two observed liquid phases, together with the predicted atomic liquid. Blue rings imply rotating quantum molecules, wiggly lines imply entangled rotor state, and solid bonds are where calculation shows a covalent bond. Credit: Science 26 June 2015: Vol. 348 no. 6242 pp. 1429-1430. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac6626 (Phys.org)—A team of researchers working at Sandia National Labs working with another team from the University of Rostock in Germany, has succeeded in squeezing liquid deuterium into becoming what appeared to be a metal. In their paper published...

Human factors are an important element in understanding how people will react to situations. The late Jonathan Sime was a Surrey-based environmental psychologist who made considerable contributions to this field. To quote...: "The most important finding of the research is the fact that the start-up time (ie, people's reaction to an alarm) is as (if not more) important as the time it takes physically to reach an exit . . . On average two-thirds of the time from onset of the alarm to reaching an exit was spent by people not moving at all. On average one-third of the time...

Like something straight out of "The Twilight Zone", a swirling vortex has opened up in a giant lake on the border of Oklahoma and Texas. The gaping hole — which appeared recently in Lake Texoma — alarmed everyone from Twitter users to the Tulsa District US Army Corps of Engineers, who posted a YouTube video of the vortex. Below the video, they describe the hole as being "8 feet in diameter and capable of sucking in a full-sized boat."

Hallucigenia sparsa from the Burgess Shale (Royal Ontario Museum 61513). The fossil is 15 mm long. Credit: Jean-Bernard Caron A new study of an otherworldly creature from half a billion years ago - a worm-like animal with legs, spikes and a head difficult to distinguish from its tail - has definitively identified its head for the first time, and revealed a previously unknown ring of teeth and a pair of simple eyes. The results, published today in the journal Nature, have helped scientists reconstruct what the common ancestor of everything from tiny roundworms to huge lobsters might have looked like....

In just a few short weeks, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will make its historic flyby of Pluto and its moons. Solar panels are unable to operate in the dim nether regions of the outer solar system, and instead, New Horizons employs something that every spacecraft that has thus far ventured beyond Jupiter has carried in its tool kit: a plutonium-powered Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or RTG. ... One of the first spacecraft that sported an RTG was the Transit-4A satellite launched on June 29th, 1961. Another similar satellite in the series, Transit-5BN-3, was lost shortly after launch along with its plutonium-fueled...

Metals had never been found in Chachapoyas before the finding of these two vessels. They might not be as sacred as the Holy Grail, but two metal vessels recently discovered in Chachapoyas are turning heads in regards to understanding the region’s ancient history. “The Finding of these vessels will change the story about Chachapoyas” the Decentralized Department of Culture of the Amazonas head, Jose Santos Trauco Ramos, told El Comercio. The discovery of two silver vessels in the Soloco Purunllacta in Chachapoyas of the Amazonas department are unlike anything the archaeological team has found in its history. Investigations until this...

A remarkably well-preserved ancient Roman ship has been discovered on the seabed off the coast of Sardinia. The 2,000-year-old wreck was found at a depth of 150ft by a specialised diving unit of the Italian police, working in collaboration with archaeologists, in the strait that separates Sardinia from Corsica. The ship was carrying a load of terracotta tiles, which are also in a good state of preservation. The roof tiles, believed to have been produced in or around Rome, were packed into the hold of the vessel, which is 60ft long and 23ft wide. They were probably going to be...

Age: Extinct, since the Late Cretaceous. Appearance: Thick-headed dinosaur, hence the name, which means “thick-headed lizard”. Thick-headed as in stupid? Well, they weren’t clever, but it’s really because they had spiky, domed skulls to protect their tiny brains. They’re dinosaurs. What else are they like? Socially aggressive, accidentally racist. How can a dinosaur be racist? It’s due to their appearance in the blockbuster Jurassic World. From what I’ve seen, the dinosaurs in Jurassic World are equal-opportunity devourers. True, but early on in the film, after some pachycephalosauruses have escaped their sector, a character utters the line: “The pachys are out...

Climate experts warn the amount of light and warmth released by the sun is nosediving to levels "not seen for centuries". They fear a repeat of the so-called 'Maunder Minimum' which triggered Arctic winter whiteouts and led to the River Thames freezing 300 years ago. The Met Office-led study warns although the effect will be offset by recent global warming, Britain faces years of unusually cold winters. A spokesman said: "A return to low solar activity not seen for centuries could increase the chances of cold winters in Europe and eastern parts of the United States but wouldn't halt global...

Causality is the relationship between cause and effect. This thing (cause) made this happen (effect). Now, I am not a Southerner. I have no vested history with the ConfederateFlag/Battle Flag of The Northern Virginia Army. What I find galling about this issue is the deliberate ignorance of Causality by too many. Did Dylan dispshirt kill nine Americans of African descent (effect) as a reaction to the flag (cause)? Or, did Dylan dispshirt kill nine Americans of African descent (effect) so he could be famous (cause)? It is disingenuous in the extreme, and intellectually lazy, to assert that a flag caused...

(Newser) – A jawbone found in Romania more than a decade ago provides the first genetic evidence that humans and Neanderthals knocked boots in Europe before the latter disappeared between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. Scientists who came across the bone of one of the earliest modern humans in Europe in a cave known as Pestera cu Oase noticed it had both modern human and Neanderthal traits. Now, a study of the bone's DNA—made possible by recent technological advances—explains why. "The sample is more closely related to Neanderthals than any other modern human we've ever looked at before," Harvard researcher...

Explanation: What are those bright objects hovering over the horizon? Planets -- and the Moon. First out, the horizon featured is a shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean that occurs at the Galicia National Park in northern Spain. Next furthest out, on the left, is the Moon. Easily the brightest object on the night sky, the Moon here was in only a crescent phase. The next furthest out, on the right, is the planet Venus, while planet Jupiter is seen at the top of the triangle. The long exposure from our rapidly rotating Earth made all of celestial objects -- including...

The alleged fried rat that was found by a KFC customer is nothing more than another piece of chicken in the bucket. Last week, a California man named Devorise Dixon claimed that a piece of meat that came in his KFC meal was a fried rat. “It was very nasty,” he said. “I spit it out. I looked down at my hand and I realized that it was in the shape of a rat with a tail and everything in it.” Independent lab results showed that the breaded lump was, in fact, a piece of chicken. KFC spokesman Rodrigo Coronel...