Astronomers have spotted a faint, previously unknown star whipping around Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, on the tightest and most extreme orbit ever recorded. This sequence of images, taken with the GRAVITY instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, show several stars orbiting Sagittarius A*. One of these stars, known as S301, was recently found to pass...

New simulations suggest supernova explosions of the Universe’s first stars scattered the ingredients for rocky planets only 100 million years after the Big Bang, with water already present in some planet-forming disks. This artist’s impression shows a field of Population III stars as they would have appeared a mere 100 million years after the Big Bang. Image credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J....

Archaeologists in southwestern Germany have unearthed two miniature bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory, among the smallest and most delicate examples of Ice Age art ever found. Two bird figurines found at Hohle Fels Cave in Germany. Image credit: Ralf Ehmann / University of Tübingen / Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art. The two ancient figurines, roughly 2 cm (0.8 inches) long and weighing...

Paleontologists in China have identified a new species of armored, jawless fish from rocks around 419 million years old whose skull was shaped like the wing of a bat and whose unusual head made it an efficient glider through Devonian seas. Life reconstruction of Bataspis crux. Image credit: Dinghua Yang. Bataspis crux belongs to Galeaspida, an extinct group of jawless fishes that lived only in what...

Scientists analyzing DNA of Madagascar’s iconic baobab trees have concluded that a widespread species called Adansonia za is actually two, formally resurrecting a name first given to the tree more than a century ago and raising the tally of baobab species native to the island from six to seven. Adansonia za. Image credit: Hectonichus / CC BY-SA 3.0. Baobabs — with their swollen trunks and...

For decades, physicists have puzzled over a deceptively simple question: how does a proton carry its baryon number, the quantum property that marks it as matter rather than antimatter? According to a new paper by researchers with the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the baryon number appears to be carried not by the proton’s three quarks alone, but by the web of gluons...

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa have identified a molecular pathway that may explain how folic acid (vitamin B9) helps prevent neural tube defects, linking the vitamin to a key developmental signal made from vitamin A. Folic acid supplementation during pregnancy is the commonly accepted treatment to prevent neural tube defects. “Before an...

Neanderthals vanished roughly 42,000 years ago, but a piece of their biology appears to be quietly at work in some people today, according to a new study led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Aspects of Neanderthal anatomy live on in people today. Image credit: Holger Neumann / Neanderthal Museum. “Neanderthals are the most well-known among archaic human...

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;...

Dr. Ian Towle, a researcher with the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University, proposes folding nearly 5 million years of hominin fossils into the genus Homo, arguing that traits once used to separate species — big brains, tool use — no longer hold up. Paranthropus boisei. Image credit: © Roman Yevseyev. “Recent discoveries are eroding the usefulness and accuracy of current...