Handwriting examiners in the digital age

People are writing more than ever with their keyboards and phones, but handwritten notes have become rare. Even signatures are going out of style. Most credit card purchases no longer require them, and if they do, you can ...

Swifts set new record for swiftness

Swifts aren't called "swifts" for nothing. They're known for being among the fastest migrating small birds around. When they aren't breeding, common swifts stay in the air most of the time—up to 10 months of the year. Scientists ...

Rare pattern observed in migrating common swifts

Compared with other migratory birds, the common swift follows a very unusual pattern when it migrates from the breeding areas in Europe to its wintering locations south of the Sahara. This is what researchers have observed ...

A cosmic baby is discovered, and it's brilliant

Astronomers tend to have a slightly different sense of time than the rest of us. They regularly study events that happened millions or billions of years ago, and objects that have been around for just as long. That's partly ...

Astronomers report most distant blazar ever observed

Although it may have a difficult designation to remember, PSO J030947.49+271757.31, the most distant blazar observed to date, reveals important details about ancient black holes and places tight constraints on theories of ...

NASA's Fermi, swift missions enable a new era in gamma-ray science

A pair of distant explosions discovered by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have produced the highest-energy light yet seen from these events, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The record-setting ...

Fake chimneys for birds that need vertical hollows to rest

People from New England to Texas are building fake chimneys as nesting spots and migration motels for chimney swifts, little birds that are dwindling in number as the nation's architectural landscape changes.

New hard X-ray eclipsing polar identified

Using ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Swift spacecraft, astronomers have found that a hard X-ray source known as 2PBCJ0658.0-1746 is an eclipsing magnetic cataclysmic variable of the polar type. The finding, presented in a paper ...

page 3 from 13