Parents often hear the warning: "If your child doesn't learn a second language early, they'll never be fluent." Adults, meanwhile, are told: "It's just too late for you to learn now." These claims are familiar and tidy, but misleading. Are they actually true? Is it better to learn a second language as a child or as an adult? The short answer is that it depends on what we mean by "better."
The universe is exploding. Or parts of it are. The night sky may seem calm, even serene, but that masks events of a catastrophic and nearly unimaginable scale. Across the galaxy and even the cosmos itself, immense outbursts of energy occur that could easily vaporize our planet. Happily, space is vast, and the terrible distance between these events and us diminishes what we see to a faint glowusually.
This particular exoplanet quickly captured astronomers' attention with its extreme variations in brightness. Most objects in space appear to blink, due either to physical changes within the planet or star, or external factors. For super-Jupiter exoplanets, Zhang said, this change in brightness is usually minimal, hovering at 1 to 2%. But on VHS 1256b, brightness variations neared 40%, the largest ever recorded for an object of its size.
More than 100 galaxies can be seen in Galaxy Cluster Abell 209, situated about 2.8 billion light-years away. Though they look close to one another, these galaxies are still separated by millions of light-years. Their combined mass manages to warp and magnify some even more-distant galaxies through a process called gravitational lensing. Lensed galaxies here appear stretched or streaky toward the center.
Collectively, the genetic variants in this population are outside the range of previously described human diversity. What's distinct? Estimates of the timing of when this ancient south African population branched off from any modern-day populations place the split at over 200,000 years ago, or roughly around the origin of modern humans themselves. But this wasn't some odd, isolated group; estimates of population size based on the frequency of genetic variation suggest it was substantial.
Following publication of this article, we were alerted via PubPeer to an inadvertent image duplication in Extended Fig. 7b in our paper. Upon carefully examining all the figures, we have discovered another duplication error in Extended Fig. 3g. The errors occurred during figure preparation by using placeholder images originating from similar areas of a well. The errors do not compromise the results or the conclusions of our work.
The first supermoon of the year might have made us wait ten months for it, but, lucky for us, we're getting spoiled with two more before the new year. And even better tonight's is expected to be the best of the bunch. The supermoon, known as a beaver supermoon is projected to appear even bigger and brighter than the last one and it's going to be framed against all the sparkle of Bonfire Night.
