You can read the rest - and see an artist's recreation of this bizarre creature - here.Fossils of an ancient, spiny creature dubbed a "walking cactus" have been found in China, a new study says.
The 2.4-inch-long (6-centimeter-long) Diania cactiformis had a worm-like body and ten pairs of armored and likely jointed legs. It would have lived about 500 million years ago during a period of rapid evolution called the Cambrian explosion.
may be the first (and perhaps the only) U.S. government film depicting the Cold War nightmare of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict. The U.S. Air Force produced it during 1956-1957 at the request of the Strategic Air Command. Unseen for years and made public for the first time by the National Security Archive, the film depicts the U.S. Air Force's implementation of war plan "Quick Strike" in response to a Soviet surprise attack against the United States and European and East Asian allies.Check it out:
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You can read the rest of the article here.Clouds bright enough to see at night are not as hard to find as they once were.
These so-called night-shining clouds are still rare -- rare enough that Matthew DeLand, who has been studying them for 11 years, has seen them only once. But his odds are increasing. [Related: In Images: Reading the Clouds.]
These mysterious clouds form between 50 and 53 miles (80 and 85 kilometers) up in the atmosphere, altitudes so high that they reflect light long after the sun has dropped below the horizon.
DeLand, an atmospheric scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has found that night-shining clouds -- technically known as polar mesospheric or noctilucent clouds -- are forming more frequently and becoming brighter. He has been observing the clouds in data from instruments that have been flown on satellites since 1978.
Motion silences awareness of color changes from Jordan Suchow on Vimeo.
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You can read more here. Personally, I find it difficult to even attempt to comprehend the numbers being used here - but Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar is a helpful visualization of astronomical time-spans like 13 billion years.The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed.
It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.
An international team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was in "overdrive".
The image, which has been published in Nature journal, was detected using Hubble's recently installed wide field camera.
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