A human skull hung on a cave wall in northern Greece for more than 300,000 years. When a villager spotted it in 1960, cemented in place by mineral deposits, it launched a scientific mystery that would outlast most of its original investigators. The skull belonged to no one researchers could immediately identify. It looked ancient,
A chunky, four-legged creature the size of a football has forced a reconsideration of one of evolution’s more practical questions: when did land animals first develop a taste for plants. The answer, based on a 307 million year old skull found inside a fossilized tree stump in Nova Scotia, appears to be much earlier than
As Scotland’s west coast recedes from view, the ocean resembles a mirror, broken only by the swash of the boat and the dolphins chasing us. We’re headed to the craggy, uninhabited islands known as the Garvellachs. Only reachable during Scotland’s short summer, there is nothing between here and North America, and so landing – or
The idea of using in-situ resources, such as water, on the surface of distant worlds to synthesize rocket fuel has been around for many decades. For many years, for instance, scientists have suggested using frozen water on the Moon to ensure future space travelers have a way to make the journey back home. Now, as
An annular solar eclipse will turn the sun into a dramatic “ring of fire” on Feb. 17, as the moon passes between Earth and the sun, leaving a thin outer ring of sunlight visible. This striking effect will last up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds at the greatest eclipse. The eclipse will progress as
The International Space Station (ISS) returned to full strength with Saturday’s arrival of four new astronauts to replace colleagues who bailed early because of health concerns. SpaceX delivered the US, French and Russian astronauts a day after launching them from Cape Canaveral. Last month’s medical evacuation was Nasa’s first in 65 years of human spaceflight.
Girls and women are often said to be more attuned to the faces of others, an important skillset needed for empathy, but results are mixed, and recent research suggests this preference is not something they are born with. A meta-analysis published in 2025 examined 31 studies featuring 40 separate experiments on how one-month-old girls and
Scientists discovered human footprints preserved in ancient mud at White Sands, New Mexico. These footprints appear to date back to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) – a period during the last Ice Age roughly 23,000 years ago when glaciers were at their largest. This finding sparked a lot of interest because it suggested that humans
Material scientists in the Netherlands have whipped up a new compound that has the best qualities of both plastic and glass. The so-called “compleximer” maintains the reformability of glass while being impact-resistant like plastic. There are massive practical implications for a material like this, though exactly how it’s functioning remains a mystery to the researchers.
NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS flaring dramatically months after its closest pass by the Sun. Only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected in our solar system, 3I/ATLAS is offering scientists a rare chemical snapshot of material formed around another star. The new findings expand the growing dataset gathered since its