For decades, the motions of stars near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy have been treated as some of the clearest evidence for a supermassive black hole. But Dr. Valentina Crespi from the Institute of Astrophysics La Plata and colleagues suggest that a radically different kind of compact object — one made of self-gravitating fermionic dark matter — could reproduce the same stellar motions. A...

Using high-precision radio-occultation measurements from NASA’s Juno mission and incorporating the effects of zonal winds, planetary scientists derived Jupiter’s shape with an order-of-magnitude reduction in uncertainty, finding polar, equatorial and mean radii smaller than previous estimates made with NASA’s Pioneer and Voyager missions. This visible-light image of Jupiter was created from...

Technological innovations in Africa and Western Europe in the later part of the Middle Pleistocene signal the behavioral complexity of hominin populations. Yet, at the same time, it has long been believed that hominin technologies in Eastern Asia lack signs of innovation and sophistication. Archaeologists have now uncovered evidence of technological innovations at the site of Xigou in China’s Henan...

A fossil trunk vertebra from the Chiting Formation of Taiwan reveals that nearly 4-m-long pythons roamed the island during the Middle Pleistocene. An artistic reconstruction of the possible ecological interaction between Python and Toyotamaphimeia in the Middle Pleistocene of Taiwan. Image credit: Lab of Evolution and Diversity of Fossil Vertebrates, National Taiwan University / Cheng-Han Sun. Python...

Ornithologists with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have stitched together the most complete avian evolutionary tree ever, unveiling surprising relationships and offering bird lovers the illustrated Birds of the World Phylogeny Explorer to trace lineages and evolutionary milestones. European bee-eaters (Merops apiaster). Image credit: Rashuli / CC BY 2.0. Understanding avian phylogeny is a fundamental...

Physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst argue that an ultra-high-energy neutrino detected by the KM3NeT experiment could be the signature of an explosion of a ‘quasi-extremal primordial black hole,’ pointing toward new physics beyond the Standard Model. The KM3NeT experiment has recently observed a neutrino with an energy around 100 PeV, and IceCube has detected five neutrinos with...

Wild blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) are North American perennial plants rich in polyphenols, including flavonoids, beneficial to human health. A new paper published in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition provides a summary of the evidence and perspectives presented at an expert symposium that focused on wild blueberries and cardiometabolic health. Vaccinium angustifolium....

The woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) is a cold-adapted herbivore that went extinct around 14,000 years ago, but little is known about their population decline prior to extinction. In new research, scientists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics and Stockholm University generated a high-coverage genome from one of the last known woolly rhinoceros remains, which was recovered from the stomach...

Two immense, ultrahot rock structures located at the base of Earth’s mantle, around 2,900 km beneath Africa and the Pacific, have been shaping Earth’s magnetic field for millions of years, according to a new study led by University of Liverpool’s Professor Andy Biggin. Two enormous blobs of solid, superheated material located at the base of Earth’s mantle affect the underlying liquid outer...

New research led by McGill University scientists suggests human sleep patterns (chronotypes) fall along a broader biological spectrum — with each subtype tied to unique health and behavioral traits — challenging the simple ‘early bird/night owl’ divide. Zhou et al. identify a total of five distinct biological subtypes, each associated with different patterns of behavior and health....