The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, around a magnetar in Norma…
Empty space, it turns out, is not optically empty. After more than 140 hours watching the magnetar 1E 1547-5408 with an X-ray telescope, astronomers found the star's X-rays polarized exactly as they would be if the vacuum around it were acting like a crystal — vacuum birefringence, predicted by quantum theory in the 1930s and never before seen in nature.
Meanwhile, in a naked mole-rat colony…
Naked mole-rat queens keep every other female in the colony sterile using a single chemical they alone produce. Remove the odor and the peace-and-celibacy arrangement that governs the colony starts to break down — a chemical monarchy with no real parallel among mammals.
Meanwhile, deep in Congo's rainforest…
An unfamiliar call in the canopy led researchers to a partial photograph, then to DNA, and finally to a monkey species no scientist had described. It lives in one of the least-surveyed forests on the planet and may already be close to extinction.
Meanwhile, over the Cretaceous Gulf of Mexico…
The asteroid that ended the Cretaceous may have killed far faster than anyone modeled. Fine dust thrown into the upper atmosphere trapped the heat of re-entering debris, turning the sky into a broiler within minutes and potentially cooking exposed animals worldwide in the first hours — not the slow, dark starvation long assumed.
Meanwhile, over the Sahara aboard Concorde…
A Concorde prototype with telescopes cut into its roof once flew into the Moon's shadow and simply kept pace with it, stretching a seven-minute eclipse into roughly 74 minutes of totality. It remains the longest continuous look at the Sun's corona ever recorded from inside an eclipse.