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Pollination is a hallmark of flowering plants, with animal pollinators such as bees and birds sustaining the world’s food supply – not to mention our cravings for coffee, honey and macadamia nuts. But new research raises the possibility that animal-assisted pollination may have appeared in the ocean long before plants moved ashore. The study, carried out by a research group based in France and Chile, is the first to document a species of seaweed that relies on tiny marine crustaceans speckled in pollen-like spores to reproduce. Since red algae Gracilaria gracilis evolved long before land plants appeared, the researchers say their research suggests animal-assisted pollination could have occurred about 650 million years ago in the oceans once a suitable pollinator appeared. On land in flowering plants and gymnosperms that have seeds, the male reproductive cells, or gametes, fly in the form of pollen grains, which are carried by the wind, through the water, or by surprise insects, t...

Penguins are no strangers to climate change. Their life history has been shaped by fluctuations in temperature, and their bodies are highly specialized for some of the most extreme conditions on Earth. However, scientists fear the penguin’s evolutionary path may have stalled, thanks to the lowest evolutionary rate ever detected in birds. An international team of researchers has just published one of the most comprehensive studies on penguin evolution to date, which is the first to integrate data from living and fossil penguin species. The research reveals a general chaotic penguin life history, with three-quarters of all known penguin species – now represented only by fossils – already extinct. “Over 60 million years, this iconic bird has evolved into a highly specialized marine predator, and is now well-adapted in some of the most extreme environments on Earth,” the authors wrote. “However, as their evolutionary history reveals, they now stand as guardians high...

Just a week after its first images were shown to the world, the James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago, a scientist analyzing the data said Wednesday. Known as GLASS-z13, this galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified, Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics told AFP. “We are potentially seeing the light of the most distant star that anyone has ever seen,” he said. The further away the object is from us, the longer it will take for its light to reach us, and so gazing back into the distant universe is looking into the deep past. JWST has the potential to break records, discovering galaxies that existed when the universe was only 300 million years old! Light from GLASS-z13 took 13.4 billion years to reach us, but the distance between us is now 33 billion light years due to the expansion of the universe! pic.twitter.com/5AcOBwHuO...

Deep in the Milky Way, roughly 22,000 light-years from Earth, a star unlike any other roars with a magnetic force that beats anything physicists have ever seen. With 1.6 billion Tesla, a pulsar called Swift J0243.6+6124 broke the previous record of around 1 billion Tesla, found in the vicinity of pulsars GRO J1008-57 and 1A 0535+262. For a little context, your average new fridge magnet comes in at around 0.001 Tesla. More powerful MRI machines manage to reach around 3 Tesla. A few years ago, engineers were credited with hitting the semi-respectable 1,200 Tesla, keeping it in a flash of just 100 microseconds. So it makes sense that 1.6 billion Tesla would demand some truly amazing physics. The kind that can only be achieved by massive objects crammed into impossible volumes and spinning at incredible speeds, fast enough to accelerate electrons to ridiculous speeds. Swift J0243.6+6124 is already considered a noteworthy star. A type of super-compact cosmic heavyweight known as a pulsar...