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Photo: Giles Laurent / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Milky Way reportedly flipped after ancient collision

New simulations and observations indicate the Milky Way likely experienced a dramatic disc flip of more than 90 degrees, probably triggered by a head-on collision with Gaia Sausage about 10 to 11 billion years ago, which helps explain the unusually slow rotation of the halo. Researchers from Durham University and colleagues report the finding at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting, with multiple outlets detailing how this ancient galactic upheaval reshaped our galaxy.

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Photo: Veszprémi Állatkert / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Monkeys, Children Share Geometry Intuition

New research across several studies shows that baboons and macaques understand geometric relationships in ways that closely resemble how preschoolers and adults reason about shapes, challenging the view that geometry is uniquely human. The findings, drawn from touchscreen shape-matching tasks and cross-cultural samples including the Tsimane’ and Mundurucu, suggest geometry intuition is a shared feature of the primate mind, not a product of formal education alone.

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