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Homo sapiens (that’s us) did not descend from a neat, single lineage. Instead, modern humans can link their heritage back to at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart over a million years ago before reconnecting just 300,000 years ago, according to a new study by computational biologists. ADVERTISEMENT The team developed an algorithm that […]

The nomadic tribes that occupied Central Asia 2,000 years ago used diamond drills to perforate gemstones when manufacturing necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. The hardest naturally occurring material on the planet, diamond is often used today for masonry drilling, yet its use in ancient times may also have been surprisingly widespread. ADVERTISEMENT Previous research has suggested […]

Seemingly unaware of the film Deep Blue Sea and countless B-movie tropes, China is set to build a new deep-sea laboratory that will be crewed by a team of resident scientists. ADVERTISEMENT In a recent announcement, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ South China Sea Institute of Oceanology said they hope to complete the construction of […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way over the last decade, moving from this horror show to pretty impressive image generation, and text generation which gets its facts right a lot of the time and confidently tells you the wrong answer when it can’t. ADVERTISEMENT But there are quite a few tasks where humans […]

Remember last year when more of us than usual were treated to a spectacular display of aurorae? If you’re one of the people who missed out, you could be in with another chance of seeing the show this week, thanks to a phenomenon known as the Russell-McPherron effect. ADVERTISEMENT While aurora season is generally considered […]

Zero is a weird number. Well, not weird as in “abundant but not semiperfect” – let’s just say it’s “unusual”. Okay, not unusual like “its largest prime factor is strictly greater than its square root” – maybe we should just describe it as “odd”. Or should we? ADVERTISEMENT Because of its unique place on the […]

Cannabis is regularly found by studies to be the least risky recreational drug and has never been linked to a fatal overdose. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at a time when scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine deliberately gave subjects an “acute” dose of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to study […]

Blue Ghost touched down on the Moon two weeks ago – and beamed back some stunning footage of its soft landing in never-before-seen detail, including “first-of-its-kind” footage of a lunar lander’s engine plumes interacting with the lunar surface.  ADVERTISEMENT Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based private company, successfully planted its Blue Ghost lunar lander in the Moon’s […]

What would you do if you discovered a body or human remains buried under your home while doing some renovations or general upkeep? It is likely a very unsettling experience, especially if the body has seemingly been there for a long time, resting beyond your awareness for years or even decades. ADVERTISEMENT This may sound […]

Palaeontologists have uncovered the world’s oldest known cerapodan dinosaur at a fossil site in Morocco, identified by a distinctive femur. We know this dinosaur group would eventually spread across the globe, but the early stages of cerapodan evolution have remained a mystery due to the scarcity of Middle Jurassic rocks worldwide. That makes this latest […]

Humankind has driven many animals to extinction, from mammoths and thylacines to passenger pigeons. However, some species have only gone locally extinct and can re-emerge in other areas if conditions change. Now, for the first time in 100 years, cougar cubs have been spotted roaming wild in Michigan.  ADVERTISEMENT Two cubs were spotted on private […]

A virus that most adults on Earth have been exposed to has a sneaky route into the brain, and a world-first study has now demonstrated that it can cause behavioral changes. While this form of infection thankfully appears to be rare, the authors do believe it merits more attention.  ADVERTISEMENT Herpes simplex virus type 1 […]

The arrival of iguanas in the South Pacific can only be explained, a team of biologists have argued, if they caught a lift on a natural raft from the Americas. That’s a journey of 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles), even if there was no backsliding or getting caught in ocean gyres – a fifth of the […]

Big earthquakes remain unpredictable and often devastating, but new technology is paving the way for a groundbreaking way to monitor seismic tremors beneath the Pacific Ocean. ADVERTISEMENT Scientists from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK and the Measurement Standards Laboratory (MSL) in New Zealand have transformed a section of the telecommunications cable on […]

In the hyperarid desert bridging Angola and Namibia lives a plant known by the Afrikaans tweeblaarkannidood, meaning “two leaves that cannot die”. It’s a fitting title for Welwitschia mirabilis, an alien-like plant whose astonishing biology and extreme longevity has been studied extensively. The upper estimates for maximum age stretch as far as 3,000 years, not […]

Blue Ghost has eyed-up all the must-see sights on the Moon. After capturing some dazzling footage of a total solar eclipse from the lunar surface, the private lander also caught imagery of a beautiful lunar sunset, marking a beautiful end to its historic mission. ADVERTISEMENT Blue Ghost, a spacecraft operated by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace […]

The genetic hardware that gave rise to humanity’s unique language capabilities first emerged at least 135,000 years ago, when all Homo sapiens still lived in one unbroken tribe. As this original group later split into a multitude of regional populations, the shared capacity for verbal and symbolic communication may have facilitated the development of modern […]

Monkeys infected with the deadly Ebola virus have been successfully cured by a 10-day regimen of pills, leading scientists to hope the treatment could be adapted for use in humans. The drug, obeldesivir, offers a substantial advantage over the two other FDA-approved treatments for Ebola as they have to be delivered via an IV drip, […]

If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. ADVERTISEMENT For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read a book in undergrad called A Panorama of Harmonic Analysis,” says Zahl, an associate professor in the University of British Columbia’s […]

Two of Earth’s five confirmed mass extinction events could have been caused by nearby supernova explosions stripping the planet’s ozone layer, a new study argues. Although the explanation has been proposed before, this work provides more rigorous evidence that the idea is plausible. ADVERTISEMENT The rate of animal and plant extinction has jumped well above […]