Typically DNA is extracted from live animals, but the process of capturing animals and extracting DNA isn’t always easy. For instance, spiders can be very mobile and difficult to catch. Spiders are also difficult to identify based on their appearance because there are so many species. Scientists from the University …

The eye has taken on several different forms in the animal kingdom including the very unique eye found in a mollusc known as the West Indian fuzzy chiton. This creature is covered in a hard shell made up of overlapping plates. Under a microscope, these plates are dotted with tiny …

Several mass extinctions have occurred in the history of the Earth that have drastically changed life on the planet, and new evidence suggests that one of these effects may have been a large reduction in the size of sea creatures. A paper, published in the journal Science, studied 1,100 fossils …

The idea of the multiverse, in which several separate universes exist in parallel, was once just science fiction but in recent years several notable astronomers and astrophysicists have come to support the idea that they may exist and now the first physical evidence of the multiverse may have been found. …

In mid-October, the Kepler space telescope detected an irregular light pattern around a star, KIC 8462852, which is about 1,500 light years away from Earth. Excitement grew across the internet when it was announced an alien mega structure such as a Dyson sphere, a huge structure that gathers energy from the star, …

NASA has released close up pictures of the Halloween asteroid that flew harmlessly past Earth on Halloween night. In earlier images, the asteroid appeared to resemble a skull but the new, high-resolution images show no such pattern. In order to capture images of the asteroid, astronomers shot microwaves at it …

Scientists may have unearthed a fossil representing a species very closely related to the last common ancestor of all apes, which consists of humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, gibbons and orangutans. The fossil, which has been called Pliobates cataloniae, is surprisingly small. Given that most of the genuses in the ape family are large …

At about 11:22 a.m. ET, the Cassini spacecraft successfully flew through the icy plumes on the South Pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. In the much anticipated flyby, Cassini passed just 30 miles over the surface of the small moon. While this isn’t the closest Cassini that has passed by Enceladus, …

The prospect of mining asteroids is not a new one. Asteroids are known to contain large quantities of minerals that are commonly used on Earth, some of which we are running out of. A new idea, however, is that asteroid mining could be used to reach Mars. The voyage to …

One of the largest drivers of climate change is the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide traps heat and can persist in the atmosphere for thousands of years, making it a major problem. In order to control climate change, we need to control the amount of carbon …