John Seiler was strolling across Virginia Tech’s campus with his students Thursday morning when something stopped them in their tracks: a sweet cherry tree with an unusual jagged scar running along ...

Severe cold temperatures hitting much of the country this week could branch out − literally. As people brace for the winter weather, some social media posts in recent days have warned of the chance ...

Measuring binary star systems' basic properties has proved exceedingly difficult. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Breaking space ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

“I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing / All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches.” —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860-61 More than 150 years after Whitman wrote those lines, the ...

Veiled in gas and clouds, the Milky Way’s center does not easily give up secrets. The initial detection of its supermassive black hole (SMBH) decades ago posed as many riddles as it solved, including ...

Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a ...

From microbes to four-legged critters, dead trees play an essential role in a forest’s ecosystem. Experts say it's rare that removal is necessary. Letting dead trees, like this bristlecone pine in the ...