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Here's Where Your Backyard Was 300 Million Years Ago

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology...

Convergent Evolution Cheat Sheet Now 120 Million Years Old

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than...

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Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific...

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Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) accounts for 20% of the calories consumed by the entire world and is one of the Big Three globally important crops, along with rice and corn. 

A jet of X-rays from the supermassive black hole in quasar
GB 1428+4217, 12.4 billion light years from Earth, has been detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory - the most distant X-ray jet ever observed. 

Giant black holes at the centers of galaxies can pull in matter at a rapid rate producing the quasar phenomenon. The energy released as particles fall toward the black hole generates intense radiation and powerful beams of high-energy particles that blast away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. These particle beams can interact with magnetic fields or ambient photons to produce jets of radiation. 

Millions of years ago, tiny animal thieves going by the alias protozoa held algae captive and then exploited and stole their genes for energy production, thereby evolving into a new and more powerful species.

But the little protozoan outlaws couldn't completely hide all evidence of the captive algae and have been effectively frozen in time - and then caught in the act by genetic sequencing. 

The protozoa captured genes for photosynthesis, the process of harnessing light to produce energy which is used by all plants and algae on earth. Scientists assume that quantum leaps of evolution occurred by one organism cannibalizing another, but hard evidence is rare.

When it comes to the number of pieces of information the mind can cope with before confusion sets in, the "magic" number is seven, psychologists have long said.  But did phone companies pick that because of the claim or did folk wisdom say it must be seven because that is what phone companies used?

In 1956, American psychologist George Miller published a paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", in Psychological Review, arguing the mind could cope with seven chunks of information.

Temperature rises are consistent with projections made in the IPCC's fourth assessment report (AR4) but satellite measurements show that sea levels are rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the report, about 60 percent faster, says a new report. 

They used an analysis of global temperatures and sea-level data over the past two decades, comparing them both to projections made in the IPCC's third and fourth assessment reports. Results were obtained by taking averages from the five available global land and ocean temperature series.

Quasars are the luminous centers of distant galaxies powered by huge black holes.  Although black holes are noted for pulling material in, most quasars also accelerate some of the material around them and eject it at high speed.

Many theoretical simulations suggest that the impact of these outflows on the galaxies around them may resolve several enigmas in modern cosmology, including how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass, and why there are so few large galaxies in the Universe. However, whether or not quasars were capable of producing outflows powerful enough to produce these phenomena has remained unclear until now.