Scientists discover prehistoric 'Jurassic butterfly' and other top stories.

• Scientists discover prehistoric 'Jurassic butterfly'

  

  Scientists have discovered an insect that went extinct for more than 120 million years and featured many of the traits associated with modern butterflies including markings on the wing called eye spots. Known as Kalligrammatid lacewings, paleobotanists for the past century have known they lived in Eurasia during the Mesozoic. But it’s taken recent discoveries of well-preserved fossils from two sites in northeastern China to demonstrate how similar they were to modern butterflies. Thanks to exte..

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• Pandemic Decimating Bee Populations Worldwide Is Man-Made And Driven By European Honeybees

  

  Study found that the pandemic that is currently destroying bee populations around the world is man-made. The Deformed Wing Virus is largely driven by the European honeybee Apis mellifera populations.(Photo : Paul Rollings | Flickr) There is a disease currently destroying bee populations around the world. New study found that the disease is manmade and is being driven by the honeybee populations in Europe called the Apis mellifera. The dreaded Deformed Wing Virus is destroying bee hives around ..

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• Congress Scolds NASA, Underscoring How Far We Are From Mars

  

  NASA's big Mars plan. Congress looked it over on Wednesday and found it wanting. Image from NASA It seemed like Congress was finally in the mood to appreciate NASA. After all, the federal space agency has been doing the kind of work that gets a space agency noticed the past couple of years. It pulled off the first launch of the Orion spacecraft in 2014, and then the agency followed up by discovering water on Mars and giving us unprecedented images of Pluto in 2015. And Congress responded wi..

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• Plasma physicist discusses the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator

  

  Thomas Klinger, director at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in front of the 725-ton-heavy plasma container for the nuclear fusion experiment Wendelstein 7-X located in Greifswald. Credit: Stefan Sauer. Researchers from the Max Planck ...

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• Black Tarantula Named After Singer Johnny Cash Among 14 New Spider Species Found In The US

  

  Dark, charismatic and brooding -- these are words to describe famous country singer Johnny Cash, and apparently a new spider species is as fascinating as him, too. A black tarantula found among 14 new spider species in the United States is now named after the musical icon.(Photo : Dr. Chris A. Hamilton) Despite the technological and scientific advancements of the 21st century, there are a lot of things we still don't know about Earth and its inhabitants. For instance, there are 55 known specie..

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• Deep-Sea Creature 'Purple Socks' May Hold Clue To Evolution Of Animal Life

  

  Researchers from Australia and the United States have discovered four new species of purple sock-like creatures that belong to the genus Xenoturbella. This allowed them to identify the placement of the creatures in animal tree of life. (Photo : Greg Rouse | Scripps Oceanography) An international team of scientists from Australia and the United States may have finally determined the identity of a worm-like animal that had baffled Swedish biologists for close to six decades. Since the discovery..

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• Saturn's ring mystery: Why are opacity and density a mismatch?

  

  In studying the mass of Saturn’s rings, astronomers have stumbled on a surprising finding: more opacity does not necessarily mean more mass, as one might expect."Appearances can be deceiving," Phil Nicholson, an astronomy professor at Cornell University, said in an announcement."A good analogy is how a foggy meadow is much more opaque than a swimming pool, even though the pool is denser and contains a lot more water," explained Dr. Nicholson, who participated in a recent analysis of data collec..

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• Shared noses: Extinct wildebeest relative was remarkably dinosaur-like

  

  You might not expect to find many similarities between a mammal and a reptile, particularly if they lived millions of years apart. But scientists have found that two such extinct beasts share a rare, distinctive facial feature.An extinct relative of the wildebeest and a duck-billed dinosaur both had bizarre crests on their heads. But it wasn't the protruding bump that has most intrigued scientists, it's what they found beneath.The bony crest is hollow, forming a trumpet-shaped nasal passage unl..

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• Atlas V rocket launches into space with military GPS satellite

  

  The Atlas V rocket carrying a military satellite launched successfully into space Friday morning despite a steady breeze that had threatened to scrub the mission.With a brisk wind and cooler-than-normal temperatures, the rocket lifted off at its appointed time and soon disappeared into space. The Atlas V was carrying with it the last in a 12-satellite series, the IIF series, meant to upgrade the GPS satellite system launched by the Air Force.The IIF series started launching in 2010 and will sup..

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• The 'Floating Hills' of Pluto (Photo)

  

  Hills of water ice on Pluto 'float' in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move over time like icebergs in Earth's Arctic Ocean — another example of Pluto's fascinating geological activity. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Mini-mountains of water-ice creep across Pluto's surface, carried slowly along by the dwarf planet's nitrogen-ice glaciers, a newly released photo suggests. The image, which was captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic Pluto flyby last July, shows that the ..

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