Fossils from Chinese Cave Fill Crucial Gap in History of Gigantopithecus blacki
Webb Delivers Strongest-Ever Case for ‘Black Hole Stars’ Lurking in Early Universe
New Species of Ancient Bear-Dog Identified in Spain
Amazon’s Elusive Short-Eared Dog May Be More Common than Researchers Once Thought
Scientists Capture First-Ever Images of Cozumel Dwarf Fox
Study: Cave Lions were Distinct Species that Occasionally Bred with Ancestors of Today’s Lions
For several years, astronomers have been puzzling over a peculiar population of objects discovered by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope — faint, red objects from the early Universe dubbed ‘little red dots.’ Using Webb’s NIRCam and NIRSpec instruments, University of Texas at Austin astronomer Vasily Kokorev and his colleagues have now obtained the deepest spectrum ever taken...
Planetary scientists analyzing a lunar meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 12593 have uncovered evidence of an asteroid impact that occurred 3.5 billion years ago on the Moon, helping to reconstruct a period of intense bombardment that left lasting marks across the inner Solar System. XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts;...
New radiocarbon dates from Sala Keimada, a hard-to-reach chamber of Cueva Palomera in the province of Burgos, northern Spain, suggest that generations of people returned to the sacred space from the end of the Ice Age through the Iron Age, leaving behind art, structures and offerings. Sala Keimada, a chamber of Cueva Palomera in Burgos, Spain. Image credit: Ortega-Martínez et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105818. “Cueva...
Deep inside a limestone cave in southern China, paleontologists have uncovered an assemblage of thirteen fossilized teeth belonging to Gigantopithecus blacki, the largest primate species ever known to have lived. The discovery fills a gap in the fossil record and offers new clues about how the species responded to a dramatic climatic change 1.2 to 0.7 million years ago. An artist’s impression of...
Two elusive groups of millipedes, Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida, were the last missing pieces in the evolutionary history of Earth’s oldest land animals, according to a team of entomologists led by Virginia Tech. To date, 14,232 millipede species have been described, with at least as many still awaiting discovery. Image credit: Vasquez-Valverde et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.05.035. “Millipedes...
Physicists at the University of Oxford have engineered a new class of ‘cat states’ — quantum superpositions constructed not from ordinary wave packets, but from deeply exotic, nonclassical components — opening unexpected paths toward more resilient quantum computers. Quantum mechanics defies classical intuition, most famously through Schrödinger’s cat, where systems exist in superpositions...
Copper diacetyl bis(4-methyl-3-thiosemicarbazone), or Cu(ATSM), restored a key waste-removal system in the brain, reducing toxic amyloid-beta buildup and improving spatial memory in lab models of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a team of researchers at Monash University. Using the APP/PS1 mouse model of familial Alzheimer’s disease, Pyun et al. investigated the effect of Cu(ATSM) on brain microvascular...
The extinct Eurasian cave lion (Panthera spelaea) and today’s African and Asian lions (Panthera leo) belong to separate evolutionary lineages that diverged roughly 1.7 million years ago — far earlier than previously thought, according to an analysis of 12 cave lion genomes spanning more than 100,000 years. Cave lions painted in the Chauvet Cave, France. Lions are among the most abundant and...
Planetary scientists analyzing a lunar meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 12593 have uncovered evidence of an asteroid impact that occurred 3.5 billion years ago on the Moon, helping to reconstruct a period of intense bombardment that left lasting marks across the inner Solar System. XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts;...
Copper diacetyl bis(4-methyl-3-thiosemicarbazone), or Cu(ATSM), restored a key waste-removal system in the brain, reducing toxic amyloid-beta buildup and improving spatial memory in lab models of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a team of researchers at Monash University. Using the APP/PS1 mouse model of familial Alzheimer’s disease, Pyun et al. investigated the effect of Cu(ATSM) on brain microvascular...
