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There could be a very serious problem with the past 15 years of research into human brain activity, with a new study suggesting that a bug in fMRI software could invalidate the results of some 40,000 papers. That's massive, because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the best tools we have to measure brain activity, and if it’s flawed, it means all those conclusions about what our brains look like

Explanation: At the core of the Crab Nebula lies a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it's actually the rightmost of two bright stars, just below a central swirl in this stunning Hubble snapshot of the nebula's core. Some three light-years across, the spectacular picture frames the glowing gas, cavities and swirling filaments bathed in an eerie blue light. The blue glow is visible radiation given off by electrons spiraling in a strong magnetic field at nearly the speed of light. Like a cosmic dynamo the pulsar powers the emission from the...

The remains that were found were radiocarbon-dated to be about 40,500 to 45,500 years old, and it was determined that Neanderthals butchered and used the bones of their peers as tools, according to a press release from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. The team identified 99 "uncertain" bone fragments as belonging to Neanderthals, which would make this the greatest trove of Neanderthal remains ever found north of the Alps. The findings also shed light on the genetics of this lost human species, adding to previously collected data on Neanderthal genes....

A 5,000-year-old industrial production center featuring furnaces, hearths, and mud-brick structures has been found in northwest India between two channels of the Ghaggar River. According to a report in Frontline, the settlement, occupied for more than 1,000 years, lacked the fortification walls, streets at right angles, citadel, and area for traders and craftsmen usually seen in Harappan sites. One of the furnaces, used for smelting gold and copper, had a platform where the smith could sit and blow through an underground tube to the fire pit. Nearby hearths were used to produce gold jewelry and copper fish hooks and spear...

Explanation: The Milky Way is massively bright on this cold, clear, altiplano night. At 4,500 meters its reflection in a river, a volcanic peak on the distant horizon, is captured in this stitched panorama under naturally dark skies of the northern Chilean highlands near San Pedro de Atacama. Along the Solar System's ecliptic plane, the band of Zodiacal light also stands out, extending above the Milky Way toward the upper left. In the scene from late April, brilliant Mars, Saturn, and Antares form a bright celestial triangle where ecliptic meets the center of the Milky Way. Left of the triangle,...

Two continent-size blobs of hot — and possibly molten — rock can be found deep underground, about halfway to the center of the Earth, according to a new study. These curious structures — each of which is so large that it would be 100 times taller than Mount Everest... One of the blobs is located beneath the Pacific Ocean, and the other can be found beneath the Atlantic. These underground structures start where the Earth's mantle meets the core, but they send "plumes" up through the rock like a Lava Lamp, the researchers said. ... Different types of seismic waves...

Archaeological sites suggest climate may not have been directly linked to cultural and technological innovations of Middle Stone Age humans in southern Africa... The Middle Stone Age marked a period of dramatic change amongst early humans in southern Africa, and climate change has been postulated as a primary driver for the appearance of technological and cultural innovations such as bone tools, ochre production, and personal ornamentation. While some researchers suggest that climate instability may have directly inspired technological advances, others postulate that environmental stability may have provided a stable setting that allowed for experimentation. However, the disconnection of palaeoenvironmental records...

MIT engineers have developed a new type of easily customizable vaccine that can be manufactured in one week, allowing it to be rapidly deployed in response to disease outbreaks. So far, they have designed vaccines against Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii (a relative of the parasite that causes malaria), which were 100 percent effective in tests in mice. The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which can be designed to code for any viral, bacterial, or parasitic protein. These molecules are then packaged into a molecule that delivers the RNA into cells, where it...

By early 1968, the United States military was involved in an escalating ground and air war in Vietnam. American aircraft were being shot down at the rate of nearly one a day, and Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam, was in full swing as B-52s unloaded racks of bombs over the jungle. The US Air Force was engaged in a constant battle against Vietnamese SA-2 surface to air missiles (SAMs), jamming them and spoofing them, electrons dueling invisibly in the air. American airmen with the job of physically destroying the missiles, going by the name Wild Weasels, went...

Explanation: A remarkable telescopic composition in yellow and blue, this scene features a trio of interacting galaxies almost 90 million light-years away, toward the constellation Virgo. On the right, two, spiky, foreground Milky Way stars echo the trio galaxy hues, a reminder that stars in our own galaxy are like those in the distant island universes. With sweeping spiral arms and obscuring dust lanes, NGC 5566 is enormous, about 150,000 light-years across. Just above it lies small, blue NGC 5569. Near center, the third galaxy, NGC 5560, is multicolored and apparently stretched and distorted by its interaction with NGC 5566....

Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy This image, captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy -- otherwise known as M31.This is a cropped version of the full image and has 1.5 billion pixels. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image.It is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.This image is too large to be easily...

More clues about where to search for a possible ninth planet lurking in the fringes of our solar system are emerging from the Kuiper belt, the icy debris field beyond Neptune. And new calculations suggest that the putative planet might be brighter — and a bit easier to find — than once thought. Evidence for the existence of Planet Nine is scant, based on apparent alignments among the orbits of the six most distant denizens of the Kuiper belt (SN: 2/20/16, p. 6). Their oval orbits all point in roughly the same direction and lie in about the same plane,...

Just hope that the current interglacial period will last for a few more decades to come. Anything else would spell disaster for much of mankind! Lyuba, of course, is the name bestowed upon the baby mammoth that was found a few years ago in the western Siberian tundra. The baby woolly mammoth is thought to be around 40,000 years old (by now) and is thought to have died by drowning at the age of two months. What’s so remarkable is Lyuba’s state of preservation, almost life-like, with skin and (sparse) hair fully intact. That kind of find is most uncommon.

As several recent military conflicts have emphasized, warfare is changing. The focus is shifting to attrition, guerilla warfare and home front terror, and as a result many militaries are working hard to become more flexible and create military forces that can rapidly adapt to any situation. It’s exactly why 3D printers are finding their way to warships for on-the-fly repairs and alterations. But a team of UK scientists and engineers from the University of Glasgow and BAE Systems are already looking much further than that. They are working on a chemical 3D printer called the Chemputer, which can grow highly...

Four specimens analyzed in this study, showing the range of sizes of different mollusc species (quarter for scale). Clockwise from the top shell: Lahillia larseni,Cucullaea antarctica, Eselaevitrigonia regina, and Cucullaea ellioti. Credit: Sierra Petersen. ================================================================================================ A new reconstruction of Antarctic ocean temperatures around the time the dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago supports the idea that one of the planet's biggest mass extinctions was due to the combined effects of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact. Two University of Michigan researchers and a Florida colleague found two abrupt warming spikes in ocean temperatures that coincide with two previously documented extinction...

Explanation: The many spectacular colors of the Rho Ophiuchi (oh'-fee-yu-kee) clouds highlight the many processes that occur there. The blue regions shine primarily by reflected light. Blue light from the star Rho Ophiuchi and nearby stars reflects more efficiently off this portion of the nebula than red light. The Earth's daytime sky appears blue for the same reason. The red and yellow regions shine primarily because of emission from the nebula's atomic and molecular gas. Light from nearby blue stars - more energetic than the bright star Antares - knocks electrons away from the gas, which then shines when the...

Explanation: South of Antares, in the tail of the nebula-rich constellation Scorpius, lies emission nebula IC 4628. Nearby hot, massive stars, millions of years young, radiate the nebula with invisible ultraviolet light, stripping electrons from atoms. The electrons eventually recombine with the atoms to produce the visible nebular glow, dominated by the red emission of hydrogen. At an estimated distance of 6,000 light-years, the region shown is about 250 light-years across, spanning an area equivalent to four full moons on the sky. The nebula is also cataloged as Gum 56 for Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum, but seafood-loving astronomers might...

At 28, Peter Scholze is uncovering deep connections between number theory and geometry. In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid “Harris-Taylor” — a 288-page book dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory — in only 37 pages. The 22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between number theory and geometry. “It was just so stunning...

July 4, 1876 was the grandest day San Francisco had ever seen. For weeks, the city prepared for the young nation's centennial. They draped American flags and bunting on every doorway and balcony in town. In glowing terms, the San Francisco Bulletin reported that huge paintings of Revolutionary War heroes were placed in "conspicuous places here, there and everywhere." Businesses were on their third straight day of celebration closures. Reverends in the town's Protestant churches gave centennial-themed Sunday sermons. Catholic churches held a special High Mass. On the bay and on land, revolutionary battles were reenacted for thrilled crowds. Thousands...

Astronomers at The University of Nottingham have released spectacular new infrared images of the distant Universe, providing the deepest view ever obtained over a large area of sky. The team, led by Omar Almaini, Professor of Astrophysics in the School of Physics and Astronomy, is presenting their results at the National Astronomy Meeting taking place this week at the University’s Jubilee Campus. The final data release from the Ultra-Deep Survey (UDS) maps an area four times the size of the full Moon to unprecedented depth. Over 250,000 galaxies have been detected, including several hundred observed within the first billion years...