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Archaic Humans May Have Boiled Their Food in Hot Springs

The proximity of hot springs to early settlements have led Sistiaga et al to wonder if early humans used hot springs as a cooking resource long before fire. Image credit: Tom Björklund.
Sep 17, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has found evidence that hot springs existed in Olduvai Gorge — a paleoanthropological site in the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania that has yielded some of the most significant fossils of hominins, such as Paranthropus boisei, Homo habilis and Homo erectus — around 1.7 million years ago. These hydrothermal features may have provided a convenient way to cook food, for instance to boil fresh kills or certain...

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Summary of major extinction events through time, highlighting the Carnian Pluvial Episode at 233 million years ago. Image credit: D. Bonadonna / MUSE, Trento.

Paleontologists Identify New Mass Extinction Event

Sep 16, 2020 by News Staff

The Carnian Pluvial Episode, a major climate change event that occurred around 234 to 232 million years ago (Late Triassic epoch), was a time of global...

An artist’s impression of the potential Jupiter-size planet WD 1856+534b and its much smaller host star, a dim white dwarf. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Astronomers Find Jupiter-Sized Exoplanet Orbiting White Dwarf

Sep 16, 2020 by News Staff

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and several ground-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting...

Reconstruction of the wine press at Tell el-Burak, looking from the south-east. Image credit: O. Bruderer / Tell el-Burak Archaeological Project.

Archaeologists Unearth Phoenician Wine Press in Lebanon

Sep 16, 2020 by News Staff

Archaeologists have unearthed the well-preserved remains of a 2,700-year-old wine press at the Phoenician site of Tell el-Burak, 9 km south of Sidon in...

An artist’s impression of the warm-Jupiter exoplanet TOI-1899b and the red dwarf TOI-1899, the lowest-mass star known to host a transiting warm Jupiter. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Astronomers Find Warm Jupiter Orbiting Cool Red Dwarf

Sep 15, 2020 by News Staff

A puffy gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter has been discovered orbiting the early M-type dwarf star TOI-1899, thanks to new data from NASA’s Transiting...

A composite image of Venus as seen by JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft. Image credit: Institute of Space and Astronautical Science / Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Astronomers Detect Biosignature Gas Phosphine in Atmosphere of Venus

Sep 14, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected phosphine (PH3) gas...

An artist’s impression of the TOI-763 planetary system. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Two Mini-Neptunes Found Orbiting Sun-Like Star

Sep 14, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the HARPS fiber-fed Echelle spectrograph mounted at the 3.6-m telescope of ESO’s La Silla...

Carbide Planets May Be Made Of Silica and Diamonds

Sep 11, 2020 by News Staff

Extrasolar planets hosted by stars with sufficiently high carbon-to-oxygen ratios could be made of diamonds and silica, according to new research by Arizona...

This Hubble image shows the massive galaxy cluster MACSJ 1206. Embedded within the cluster are the distorted images of distant background galaxies, seen as arcs and smeared features. These distortions are caused by the dark matter in the cluster, whose gravity bends and magnifies the light from faraway galaxies, an effect called gravitational lensing. This phenomenon allows astronomers to study remote galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to see. Overlaid on the image are small-scale concentrations of dark matter, represented in this artist’s impression in blue. Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps stars bound together inside a galaxy and makes up the bulk of the matter in the Universe. These blue halos reflect how the galaxy cluster’s dark matter is distributed, revealed by new results from Hubble. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / G. Caminha, University of Groningen / M. Meneghetti, Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Science of Bologna / P. Natarajan, Yale University / CLASH Team / M. Kornmesser.

New Observations Suggest Missing Ingredient in Current Dark Matter Theories

Sep 11, 2020 by News Staff

The large mass of a galaxy cluster deflects light from background objects, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The large-scale gravitational lens...

Lamsdell et al present details of the respiratory organs of Adelophthalmus pyrrhae from the Carboniferous of Montagne Noire, France, revealed through micro computed tomography (μ-CT) imaging. Image credit: Lamsdell et al, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.034.

Carboniferous-Period Sea Scorpion Was Capable of Breathing Air

Sep 11, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists have examined the fossilized remains of a previously unknown species of eurypterid (sea scorpion) and found direct evidence that these...

Hay et al for the first time investigate moon-moon tides in Jupiter’s Galilean moons and show that they can cause significant heating through the excitation of high-frequency resonant tidal waves in their subsurface oceans. Image credit: Galileo Project / Voyager Project / NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Galilean Moons of Jupiter Could Be Warming Each Other

Sep 11, 2020 by News Staff

In a process called tidal heating, gravitational push and pull from Jupiter’s Galilean moons — Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto — and the...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on a mission to explore the asteroid Bennu and return a sample to Earth. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

OSIRIS-REx Team Explores Activity of Asteroid Bennu

Sep 10, 2020 by News Staff

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, launched in 2016, is currently orbiting the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu with the aim of briefly touching on the...

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal. Image credit: Neanderthal Museum.

Researchers Sequence Mitochondrial Genome of 80,000-Year-Old European Neanderthal

Sep 9, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

An international team of scientists has successfully extracted and sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from an 80,000-year-old adult Neanderthal tooth found...

Wells et al estimate that there should be at least 10 -- currently undiscovered -- exoplanets which are favorably located to detect the Earth and are capable of sustaining life as we know it. Image credit: NASA.

Large-Scale SETI Survey of Vela Region Finds No Signs of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Sep 8, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope have searched for technosignatures — indicators of advanced extraterrestrial...

Lady Foot, a Highland wild dog native to New Guinea. Image credit: New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation.

Original New Guinea Singing Dogs Still Exist in the Wild, Study Shows

Sep 8, 2020 by News Staff

The founding population of the New Guinea singing dog, a small-to-medium-sized canid thought to be extinct in the wild since the 1970s, is not, in fact,...

Researchers Find Unique Ancient Rock Drawing of Extinct Sloth Lemur

Sep 7, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

An international team of scientists has discovered stylistically unique ancient drawings, including the only known prehistoric depiction of a now-extinct...

This composite image shows both ALMA and SPHERE/VLT observations of the disk around GW Orionis. The ALMA image (blue) shows the disk’s ringed structure, with the innermost ring (part of which is visible as an oblong dot at the very center of the image) separated from the rest of the disk. The SPHERE observations (orange-red) allowed the astronomers to see for the first time the shadow of this innermost ring on the rest of the disk, which made it possible for them to reconstruct its warped shape. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / ESO / University of Exeter / Kraus et al.

Astronomers Find Misaligned and Warped Protoplanetary Disk around Triple-Star System

Sep 3, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research) instrument...

An artistic rendering of the Horse Butchery Site and the Boxgrove people; it shows how the site was situated in front of towering chalk cliffs on the edge of an intertidal lagoon; the cliffs to the north provided all the flint used in tool making at the site and, within a few hours, the tide would have begun to cover the site in fine silt, preserving evidence of the day’s activity. Image credit: Lauren Gibson / Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Homo heidelbergensis was Extremely Resourceful, New Research Shows

Sep 3, 2020 by News Staff

New research pieces together the activities and movements of a group of Homo heidelbergensis, a poorly understood species of archaic humans that lived...

An artist’s impression of binary black holes about to collide. Image credit: Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), Australian National University.

Astronomers Witness Birth of Intermediate-Mass Black Hole

Sep 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the twin LIGO detectors located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy, have...

Artistic rendering of American mastodons (Mammut americanum). Image credit: Julius Csotonyi.

American Mastodons Migrated Across Vast Distances Due to Warming Climate, DNA Study Says

Sep 2, 2020 by News Staff

A team of researchers from McMaster University and elsewhere has carried out a phylogeographic study of the extinct American mastodon (Mammut americanum)...

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