Don’t Be Fooled: GOP Scuffle Over NIH Grants Doesn’t Mean Science Has Prevailed - Truthout

This fossil of Diadectes, a land-adapted tetrapod that lived in North America about 290 million years ago, is on view in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins. Westlothiana is from an older, aquatic lineage. Credit: Denis Finnin/© AMNHA famous Scottish fossil is forcing scientists to rethink what claw-like feet really reveal about the move onto land. Pressed flat inside two slabs of Scottish rock, a 345-million-year-old skeleton seemed to carry some unmistakable signs of life on land. Its four limbs ended in five-digit feet, and the tips of its fingers and toes looked strikingly like claws. For decades, those features helped make Westlothiana lizziae, better known as “Lizzie,” a landmark in the story of how vertebrates moved away from water and gave rise to reptiles, birds, and mammals. Yet the fossil had been crushed so badly that much of its anatomy remained hidden inside the stone. Peering through that rock with X-rays has now exposed a very different animal.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.