A new radiocarbon reassessment has established that the so-called Lapedo child from central Portugal was buried approximately 28,000 years ago, several millennia after Neanderthals are widely thought to have disappeared from the fossil record. The finding narrows the margin between documented Neanderthal extinction and the persistence of anatomically mixed traits in early modern human populations.
In 2023, my dad called to tell me he’d dropped down to four days a week at work. He’d had a long career as an insurance underwriter, though it didn’t define him. At one point, he even left the profession to become a plasterer for a decade to better balance out his schedule. Still, it
Forty million years ago, a star in a nearby galaxy exploded, spewing material across space and generating a brilliant beacon of light. That light traveled across the cosmos, reaching Earth June 29, 2025, where it was detected by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae. Astronomers immediately turned their resources to this new supernova, designated 2025pht,
A newly described artificial-intelligence coach provides feedback to make peer reviews more specific and useful.Credit: Mohd Izzuan Roslan/Alamy An artificial-intelligence coach can help peer reviewers to provide more constructive and less toxic feedback, according to a new study1. Whether that improves the quality of research papers, however, remains to be seen. Scientists doing peer reviews
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is one of the solar system’s oddities. Now, researchers have unlocked key insights about this mysterious moon, including how it came to be. The answer may also shed light on the origin of Saturn’s beautiful rings. Shrouded in a thick haze, Titan is about half the size of Earth and even
One of the largest stars known in the Universe has done something strange – and scientists are debating what it means. WOH G64, a colossal star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is – or was? – one of the largest red supergiants known, measuring more than 1,500 times the radius of the Sun. In 2013
“It almost feels like a highway we can drive on. But then we have to go down into the hollows, where you need to be mindful of Curiosity’s wheels slipping or having trouble turning in the sand,” said operations systems engineer Ashley Stroupe of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Curiosity and
Horses whinny to find new friends, greet old ones and celebrate happy moments like feeding time. How exactly horses produce that distinctive sound – also called a neigh – has long eluded scientists. The whinny is an unusual combination of both high- and low-pitched sounds, like a cross between a grunt and a squeal –
China’s reusable space plane is circling Earth once again. The Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”) spacecraft launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on Feb. 6, kicking off the robotic vehicle’s fourth-ever orbital mission. What exactly is it doing up there? You may like We don’t know for sure. The Chinese government has revealed
NEW YORK (AP) — Six planets are linking up in the sky at the end of February, and most will be visible to the naked eye. It’s what’s known as a planetary parade, which happens when multiple planets appear to line up in the sky at once. The planets aren’t in a straight line, but