Oldest Piece of Earth's Crust

Using uranium decay dating methods, a 4.4 billion-year-old zircon crystal found in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia has been confirmed as the oldest known fragment of Earth's crust, evidence of solid crust formation soon after Earth's formation itself and quickly following the impact that produced the Moon.

Fossil Ichthyosaur Live Birth

Scientists have discovered a rare 248 million-year-old fossil in China of an ichthyosaur (Chaohusaurus) that died during labor and the oldest embryonic fossils yet found, revealing that the ancient sea reptile bore live young head-first as the former land species once evolved to do.

Shape-Shifting Neutrinos Seen

Japan's Super-Kamiokande detector has found its first evidence that neutrinos interact with matter through detection of predicted levels of high-energy solar neutrino oscillations as they pass through the bulk of the Earth.

Earliest Non-African Footprints

Scientists have discovered the first fossilized human footprints outside of the African continent on a Happisburgh beach on the eastern side of England, dating back 800,000 years and providing direct evidence of the earliest known humans in Northern Europe.

Space River of Hydrogen Found

Astronomers have discovered a very faint, tenuous filament of hydrogen gas known as a cold flow winding through intergalactic space and into nearby spiral galaxy NGC 6946, supporting new theories of star formation using extragalactic sources of matter.

Dog Cancer Preserves Genes

Genetic analysis of the communicable cancer canine transmissible venereal tumour (CTVT) suggests it appeared in dogs about 11,000 years ago and preserves the identical DNA of the dog from which it originated, allowing a rare comparison of ancient versus modern animals.

New Dolphin Species Discovered

Scientists have discovered a species of river dolphin previously unknown to science in the Araguaia River of Brazil, only the fifth such freshwater species known and the first discovered since 1918.

Cosmic Background "Web" Seen

Using a distant quasar to backlight a gas cloud two million light years across, cosmologists have imaged filaments in the gas of what is believed to be a dark matter "web" providing a large-scale structure to the expanding universe as predicted by computer simulations.

First Data on Ball Lightning

While recording a thunderstorm in China, a team of researchers captured a ball lightning event on their instruments for the first time with spectrographic readings indicating the composition of the lightning the same as that of the soil, speculating the origin of ball lightning to be a combination of vaporization of silicon oxide and the resulting shockwave of the strike.

New Antarctic Sea Anemone

A research team has discovered a species of tiny sea anemone previously unknown to science living in the Ross Ice Shelf off Antarctica, the first such species living in pure ice instead of soil and the first to live upside down, hanging from the underside of the ice shelf.

Redefining the Ampere

In an effort to revise the current 1948 definition of the SI unit of electrical current (ampere) that relates current to a given force through a thought experiment, researchers have succeeded in tracking single electron charges (e) as they travel across barriers driven by voltage pulses.

Bird-Eating Fish

Long suspected but never proven until now, evidence has been captured on video of the freshwater African tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus) hunting, catching and eating low-flying barn swallows in a South African lake in Mapungubwe National Park.

Accuracy of Measured Universe

Using baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) as a standard unit of measure, astronomers with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey have measured the distances between galaxies in the universe to within 1% accuracy covering 10,000 square degrees of sky.

Earthquake Lights Explained

New research finds that mysterious lights reported for centuries before or during seismic activity are associated with areas of geological rift zones, and are theorized to be electrical charges generated from stresses between rocks that travel vertically along fault lines.