Using data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found that IRS 3 — a bloated giant star orbiting just 0.55 light-years to Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central black hole — is still forging silicate dust and harboring water molecules despite the Galaxy’s most extreme radiation environment. Mid-infrared image of the IRS 3 environment, observed with VLT/NACO...

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...

Archaeopteryx — the first ever bird to inhabit the Earth — may have hopped its way into the air, rather than launching with the single powerful leap modern birds use, according to a new biomechanical study published in the journal Developmental Biology. An illustration of Archaeopteryx. Image credit: Mark Witton. Archaeopteryx lived in what is now Germany during the Jurassic period, approximately...

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;...

Two fossilized leg bones of Denisovans — an extinct archaic Homo group whose lineage diverged from the Neanderthal lineage 550,000 years ago and was widely distributed across eastern Asia until 45,000 years ago — dredged decades ago from the seafloor off Taiwan indicate that at least some members of the group were remarkably large-bodied. An artist’s concept of a Penghu Denisovan walking...