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What if the world of dark matter was a mirror of our own, just with a broken set of rules? That might explain why dark matter appears to be so abundant yet invisible, a new theory suggests. Dark matter is the mysterious, unknown substance that seems to make up the bulk of all the mass in the universe; for every 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of regular matter, there's roughly 10 pounds (5 kg) of dark matter. It doesn't interact with light or normal matter. The only way scientists can detect it is through its subtle gravitational influence on normal matter, such as the motions of stars within galaxies and the growth of super-large structures in cosmic time. It might be easy to think that because matter and dark matter operate with different rules, one would be totally dominant over the other. But despite having wildly different properties, the amounts of normal matter and dark matter are still in the same ballpark. That seems like a strange coincidence.  To explain this, scientis...

  The specimen was collected in 1894 near Seppenrade. LWL-Museum for Natural History , Münster. Photo: CI. Scale: 100 mm. Credit: Ifrim et al., 2021, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) A small team of researchers from Germany, Mexico and the U.K. has found evidence suggesting that the reason a species of ammonite grew into giants was because of the increasing size of the mosasaurs that fed on them. In their paper posted on the open-access site PLOS ONE , the group describes their detailed study of 154 specimens of two species of ammonite fossils and what they learned about them. Ammonites are a kind of coil-shelled mollusk that went extinct millions of years ago. They were notable for their distinctive frilled suture lines. Prior research has shown that the average ammonite was no more than half a meter in diameter. But one species stands out—Parapuzosia seppenradensis, a species that could grow to have a diameter as large as 1.5 to 1.8 meters...