Astronomers have found new evidence that 3I/ATLAS, only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected entering the Solar System from beyond, formed in an extremely cold environment far from any star. The distribution of dust (blue), gas (green) and ions (red) in the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Image credit: Lea Ferellec. “This object gives us a rare chance to study material that formed...

Dr. Stephen Kane from the University of California, Riverside and colleagues offer a tidy explanation for one of the Solar System’s enduring puzzles: why Venus, so similar to Earth in size and mass, has no moon at all. NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft captured this view of Venus in February 1974. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. “Our study shows Venus didn’t require a catastrophe to arrive at...

Scientists from Curtin University and the University of York have pinpointed the origin of the Devil’s Arrows, the three towering gritstone megaliths that have stood on the edge of Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, for roughly 4,000 years, ending a long-running archaeological debate. The Devil’s Arrows, the three towering gritstone megaliths on the western outskirts of Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, the United...

Paleontologists have identified a new species of ancient, distant mammal relative from two fossil specimens found decades apart in the Manda Beds of Tanzania. The discovery suggests that rocks linked to some of the earliest potential dinosaur fossils may be younger than long assumed. Life reconstruction of Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda. Image credit: Gabriel Ugueto. Named Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda,...

In experiments in Thailand, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) learned to ignore an enticing but ineffective route to food and quickly adapted when a familiar solution stopped working. Experiment setup: (A) an elephant enters the ‘over’ opening to gain access to food in a familiarization trial; (B) an elephant enters the ‘under’ opening to gain access to food (apple) in a test trial. Image...

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have confirmed that quantum entanglement — the phenomenon Albert Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ — can survive in some of the most extreme conditions ever produced in a laboratory. In 2012, physicists from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a new boson looking very...

In a study of 2,266 workers in Finland, evening-type people, or night owls, were up to three times more likely to be treated for depression or anxiety than morning types, with poor work-life balance identified as a key contributing factor. Merikanto et al. showed that evening-types had more issues regarding work spillover to personal life and poor recovery from work and that these factors moderated...

For several decades, paleontologists have described Miracinonyx trumani — an extinct species of cheetah-like felid that roamed the North American prairies and steppe terrains more than 13,000 years ago — as North America’s answer to the African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus). New research led by the University of California, Santa Cruz suggests the picture was largely wrong. Miracinonyx...

Zircon crystals and impact-altered minerals show that a massive asteroid slammed into what is now the Pilbara region of Western Australia about 3 billion years ago. The North Pole Dome crater: (A) simplified map of the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT, Western Australia), showing Paleoarchean granite domes (pink) and greenstone belts (greens and blues); the North Pole Dome (NPD) lies near the terrane center;...

Paleoanthropologists have identified a trove of Denisovan fossils from a cave in China’s Yunnan province, extending the known range of the elusive human relative and providing the first-ever direct evidence of what its forearm bones looked like. An artist’s concept of a Penghu Denisovan walking under the bright Sun during the Pleistocene of Taiwan. Image credit: Cheng-Han Sun. “Denisovans are...