Evrim Yazgin

1 week ago | cosmosmagazine.com | Evrim Yazgin

Crocodiles are often thought of as living fossils – unchanged over millions of years. New research has shown that their evolutionary history is a lot more complicated than that. Crocodilia is the surviving family of a lineage which emerged about 230 million years ago (mya) called crocodylomorphs. This group split from other reptilian species including those that eventually became dinosaurs. Today, the crocodilia include crocodiles, alligators, caiman and gharials.

1 week ago | cosmosmagazine.com | Evrim Yazgin

NASA spacecraft Lucy is just days away from its second close encounter with an asteroid. Lucy was launched in 2021 and is on its way to Jupiter’s orbit to explore a group of asteroids known as the 10 Trojans. The spacecraft has to pass through the solar system’s main asteroid belt to get to Jupiter’s orbit, which is more than 5 times further from the Sun than Earth’s orbit. The asteroid belt is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on average about 2.8 times further from the Sun than Earth.

1 week ago | cosmosmagazine.com | Evrim Yazgin

Ice Age hearths in Ukraine have been studied using innovative archaeological techniques to better understand how ancient humans used fire. Human ancestors have been using fire for a long time. Homo erectus may have been the first human to control fire up to 2 million years ago. There is evidence from nearly 800,000 years ago of humans using fire to cook food. Controlling fire is considered one of the cornerstones of human evolutionary and social development.

1 week ago | cosmosmagazine.com | Evrim Yazgin

The year of quantum is playing host to a vast number of new quantum research papers and slowly they are filling the void of what is known, and what might prove useful to our future. Physicists have for the first time seen entanglement of the “total angular momentum” of light particles in nanoscale structures. The discovery may have implications for next-generation quantum communication and computing components.

1 week ago | cosmosmagazine.com | Evrim Yazgin

Physicists in Germany have performed the most accurate measurement of the mass of the fundamental particle neutrinos. The finding deepens physicists’ attempts to uncover laws of nature beyond even the best current theories. The standard model of particle physics – the best theory which explains the fundamental forces and particles of nature – posits that neutrinos are massless. Experiments, however, suggest that they do have mass.