Science

Archaeological deposits from a cave on Barrow Island, a large limestone continental island located 60 km off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, reveal some of the oldest evidence for Aboriginal occupation of the continent. The discovery is reported in the online edition of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Barrow …

New research from the University of Sheffield, UK, has shed light on how hunter-gatherers adopted agriculture and how crops were domesticated to depend on people. Ploughing with a yoke of horned cattle in Ancient Egypt. Domesticated crops have been transformed almost beyond recognition in comparison with their wild relatives — …

An international team of physicists from Finland and the United States has made the first experimental observations of the dynamics of isolated monopoles in quantum matter. The results are published in the journal Physical Review X. This is an artistic view of the decay of a quantum-mechanical monopole into a …

Geologists from Tohoku University, Japan, Amherst College and Washington University in Saint Louis, the United States, say they may have found the cause of the end-Ordovician mass extinction, the first of the world’s five known mass extinctions. Ordovician sea life. Image credit: Vince Smith / American Museum of Natural History …

Humans have long been shaping Earth’s landscape, but now scientists know we can shape the near-Earth environment as well. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Genna Duberstein. Anthropogenic effects on the space environment started in the late 19th century and reached their peak in the 1960s when high-altitude …

This video is made of images taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, from a position exactly between the Sun and the surface of Ceres. Dawn successfully observed the dwarf planet Ceres at opposition on April 29, 2017. Mission specialists had carefully maneuvered the spacecraft into a special orbit so that its …

Earth and Mars are very different planets right now, but they’re both small, rocky planets in the inner solar system. However, a new study suggests Mars may also have different origins than Earth. Researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology claim that analysis of Mars’ composition supports the idea that it …

Heavy rain on Mars reshaped impact craters and carved out river-like channels in the planet’s surface billions of years ago, according to a study by geologists from the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). An artist’s impression of the young Mars. Image credit: M. Kornmesser …

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Surrey, UK, has identified a crucial link between metabolism and osteoarthritis. Phenotypes of osteoarthritis: evidence suggests that patients with osteoarthritis fall into multiple phenotypic subgroups defined on the basis of the main driver of disease, one of which is a …

Giant sloths, massive animals that lived in the Americas during the Ice Age, subsisted on an exclusively plant-based diet, according to an isotopic analysis of bones reported in the journal Gondwana Research. Megatherium sloths. Image credit: Robert Bruce Horsfall. Sloths may well rank among the world’s most peculiar animals: with …