People like these Baka hunter-gatherers once ranged well beyond their current homeland in Central Africa. Credit: CYRIL RUOSO/MINDEN PICTURESChildren's skeletons give genomes more than 3000 years oldCentral Africa is far too hot and humid for ancient DNA to survive-- or so scientists assumed. Currently, the bones of four children buried thousands of years earlier...
Credit: Ghedoghedo/Wikimedia CommonsPleistocene age worms found in Arctic permafrost live and eat well after being defrosted some 42,000 years later.Two ancient nematodes are moving and eating normally again for the very first time since the Pleistocene age. The roundworms were discovered frozen in the Siberian permafrost and subsequently thawed out and resuscitated in Petri...
Neuroterus valhalla is a newly described species of cynipid gall wasp discovered in the branches of a live oak tree near the Rice University graduate student pub Valhalla. Credit: Miles Zhang/Smithsonian NMNHIts name sounds legendary, but the newly uncovered insect Neuroterus (noo-ROH'- teh-rus) Valhalla does not look or act the part. It is barely...
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterNASA's Parker Solar Probe has taken its first visible-light pictures of the surface of Venus from spaceSurrounded in thick clouds, Venus' surface is usually hidden from view. However, in two current flybys of the Earth, Parker used its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, to image the whole nightside in wavelengths...
To study superconducting materials in their “normal,” non-superconducting state, scientists usually switch off superconductivity by exposing the material to a magnetic field (left). SLAC scientists discovered that turning off superconductivity with a flash of light (right), produces a normal state with very similar fundamental physics that is also unstable and demonstrates brief flashes of...
University of Chicago researchers discovered how to create and manipulate a quantum phenomenon known as a “domain wall” – shown in this image as the lighter line between two groups of atoms. (Image adapted and color added from experiment data). Credit: Illustration by Kai-Xuan YaoControlled for the very first time, the quantum phenomenon might...
Credit: Slava TuryshevNASA states it could detect "surface features" and even "hints of habitability" on distant planets.NASA is financing research for a conceptual telescope called a "solar gravitational lens" (SGL) that can allow us to observe remote exoplanets at a fantastic resolution-- a futuristic endeavor that might assist discovery at last if we...
Credit: NASAThe James Webb Space Telescope has observed its very first star (though it was not exactly tonight)-- and even taken a selfie, NASA revealed Friday.The telescope's first photoThe steps belong to the months-long process of aligning the observatory's substantial golden mirror that astronomers hope will start unraveling the secrets of the early Universe...
Scientists from MIT have crafted a new composite material from a greater part of cellulose nanocrystals and a synthetic polymer.Credit: Adam HuntResearch on the new material has been published in the journal Cellulose.Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have engineered a new composite material made from cellulose and synthetic polymer. Cellulose fibers...
Credit: Brian KoberleinThe nature of dark matter stills astonishes astronomers. As the search for dark matter particles keeps on turning up nothing, it is tempting to throw away the dark matter model altogether, but indirect evidence for the stuff remains to be strong. So what is it? One team has an idea, and they...
