Crowded star clusters in the early Universe could have built giant stars, seeded black holes and fed the mysterious little red dots, according to a team of astrophysicists led by University of California. Los Angeles doctoral student Claire Williams. 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:...

Teghaza 001, a meteorite found in the Sahara Desert in Mali four years ago, is a fragment of Mars’ primordial crust, formed at least 4.1 billion years ago, according to a new paper in the journal Science. The largest fragment of the Martian meteorite Teghaza 001. Image credit: Liu et al., doi: 10.1126/science.adz5646. Teghaza 001 consists of eight fragments with a total mass of 798.5 g, the largest...

Some of the oldest drawings known to humanity, made roughly 37,000 years ago in France’s Chauvet Cave, are covered by a thin, translucent film of calcite that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Scientists from Sorbonne Université and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) have now found a way to detect it from a distance, without touching the walls. The Horses panel in Chauvet...

A new species of extinct megapode bird — a ground-dwelling relative of the chicken that was several times heavier than its living cousin — has been identified from a single fragment of leg bone found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Megapodius rokusi (left) next to Megapodius reinwardt (right). Image credit: Davin Arya Nirwasita. The newly described species belongs to the...

A new study led by the University of Cambridge challenges the long-standing idea that comets helped kick-start life on our home planet, suggesting that the icy bodies were largely unable to deliver the concentrated chemical ingredients needed for prebiotic chemistry. An artist’s impression of cometary impact. Image credit: Scarlett White. “Historically, scientists thought that comets were important...

Physicists with the LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced today evidence for an extremely rare particle decay that scientists have chased for more than four decades, and their result agrees with the Standard Model of particle physics. The LHCb magnet. Image credit: CERN. “What we found in these latest results is an incredibly rare decay of one of these beauty particles,...

Scientists have identified a receptor on sensory nerves that appears to detect a fatty-acid byproduct found at high levels in psoriasis skin, and blocking it eased itch and skin thickening in mice. Wheeler et al. identify a metabolic- to-sensory axis in which EKODE, an endogenous dietary linoleic acid derivative, acts as a potent ligand for the G protein-coupled receptor 35 (Gpr35) to drive chronic...

Humans and chimpanzees share more than 96% of their protein-coding DNA, yet human brains are roughly three times larger and far more complex. New research led by Lund University scientists suggests that part of the explanation may lie in a viral infection that struck chimpanzee ancestors millions of years ago and never reached ours. Gerdes et al. show that LINC00662, a human-specific transcript expressed...

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;...

Roughly one in 14 adults in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States says someone has made, shared or threatened to share sexually explicit images of them created with artificial intelligence, according to a new peer-reviewed study. Henry et al. surveyed over 7,000 people across three regions to better understand the prevalence, nature, and impacts of AI-generated image-based sexual abuse. “The...