Astronomers using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on NSF’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-m telescope have produced the largest high-resolution 3D map of the Universe, tracing the positions of more than 47 million galaxies and quasars. A small portion of DESI’s year-five map in which the large-scale structure of the Universe, created by gravity, is visible; each dot represents a galaxy;...

New research from Rice University suggests sulfur keeps Mercury’s interior molten at lower temperatures, offering new clues to how the planet’s strange crust and mantle evolved. Yishen Zhang & Rajdeep Dasgupta provide new insights into the role of sulfur in shaping the thermochemical evolution of Mercury and other similarly reduced rocky planetary systems. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins...

Hominins at the Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel relied on driftwood gathered along a lakeshore to fuel their hearths, according to new research led by archaeologists from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social and Bar-Ilan University; 780,000-year-old charcoal fragments from the site show that survival wasn’t about finding the perfect wood — it...

A new genus and species of carnivorous herrerasaurian dinosaur has been described from an incomplete but well-preserved skull found in northern New Mexico, the United States. An artistic rendition of Ptychotherates bucculentus. Image credit: Megan Sodano / Virginia Tech. The new dinosaur species roamed our planet around 201 million years ago during the Rhaetian stage of the latest Triassic. Named...

A newly-identified visual protein lets dragonflies detect deep red and near-infrared light using a mechanism strikingly similar to that in human eyes, an unexpected case of parallel evolution with potential medical applications, according to new research from Osaka Metropolitan University. Asiagomphus melaenops female in Miroku forest, Kasugai, Aichi prefecture, Japan. Image credit: Alpsdake / CC...

Using data from over one billion proton-colliding events collected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists have measured the mass of the W boson with record accuracy. The value matches the Standard Model’s prediction, giving the researchers confidence that no unexpected force is hiding in the measurement. CMS candidate collision event for a W boson decaying into a muon (red line) and...

In new research, University of Galway’s Dr. Martin David Mulligan and his colleagues followed nearly 800 participants from the Framingham Heart Study for more than a decade and a half, examining whether vitamin D levels measured in their 30s were linked to changes in the brain in later life. They found that individuals with higher circulating levels of vitamin D had lower accumulations of tau —...

Scientists have extracted and analyzed DNA from 216 canid remains, including 181 from Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europe. The oldest data that they recovered are from a 14,200-year-old dog from the Kesslerloch site in Switzerland. Their results suggest that domesticated dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) predate farming and share deep ancestry with wolves (Canis lupus) from Eurasia, challenging ideas about...

By tracing magnetic signals preserved in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia, geoscientists have found the oldest direct evidence yet that parts of the planet’s outer shell were shifting across the globe, pushing the origins of plate motion deep into Earth’s early history. Hadean Earth. Image credit: Alec Brenner. “There has been a huge range of ages suggested for timing,” said...

New research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shows that large language models (LLMs) form structured ‘trust’ assessments much like humans do, yet apply them more mechanically and, sometimes, with stronger, more consistent demographic bias. Large language models implement a coherent but rigid and sometimes biased model of interpersonal trust that only partially aligns with human judgment. As...