News Desk

At some point hundreds of millions of years ago, dinosaur scales evolved into feathers. New research published in Nature Communications might help explain how and when that transition occurred.

Mars’ moon Phobos may actually be a comet — or at least part of one — that was gravitationally captured by the Red Planet long ago, a new preprint study based on previously unpublished photos suggests.

Neanderthal children (who lived between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago) and modern human children living during the Upper Paleolithic era (between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago) may have faced similar levels of childhood stress but at different developmental stages, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that these findings could reflect differences in childcare and other behavioral strategies between the two species.

Six of the planets of the Solar System are about to line up for a rare sight in Earth’s sky. In the wee small hours of 3 and 4 June 2024, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus will appear in a straight line in an alignment known as a planet parade. Only Venus will be absent – even Earth’s waning crescent moon is going to put in an appearance.

A 7,000-year-old Neolithic settlement in modern-day Greece has, for the first time, been accurately dated down to the precise years it was built. The findings could provide a reference point in time to help date other archaeological sites in southeastern Europe. Their research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Thousands of years ago, early hunter-gatherers returned regularly to Tagua Tagua Lake in Chile to hunt ancient elephants and take advantage of other local resources, according to a study published May 22 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rafael Labarca of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and colleagues.

These traces of ancient viruses are the oldest remnants of human viruses ever discovered, New Scientist reported. They are around 20,000 years older than the previous record-holder for the most ancient human virus ever found: a common-cold virus uncovered inside a pair of 31,000-year-old baby teeth in Siberia.

Most people alive today carry traces of genes inherited from Neanderthals—the enduring legacy of prehistoric hookups with our extinct cousins. But researchers have long debated when and where that mingling happened and whether these were one-off romps or commonplace trysts. Now, an analysis of ancient and modern genomes suggests contemporary people’s Neanderthal DNA came from a single, prolonged period of mixing some 47,000 years ago.

According to a study published in Current Biology on May 22, the genetic components of the ancient populations in the western Tibetan Plateau are closest to ancient populations in the southern Tibetan Plateau, and their major genetic components have been maintained over the past 3,500 years.

If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of artificial intelligence (AI) generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ. Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here?

For nearly a century, scientists have known that the universe is expanding. But in recent decades, physicists have found that different types of measurements of the expansion rate — called the Hubble parameter — produce puzzling inconsistencies. To resolve this paradox, a new study suggests incorporating quantum effects into one prominent theory used to determine the expansion rate.

The findings contribute to the growing body of research around Traditional Ecological Knowledge and practices, demonstrating the care and specificity with which Indigenous groups have been stewarding and cultivating natural resources for millennia. The work is published in The Holocene journal.

Recent research published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry has provided new insights into the potential therapeutic effects of psilocybin, a psychedelic compound, on cognitive flexibility and weight maintenance in a rat model of anorexia.

Neanderthals and humans mated millennia ago, and their legacy lives on in us today. Here’s how.

Slowly but surely, the ground is regurgitating its secrets. The history that lies buried beneath the swirling sands of time yields, piece by piece, to technology. But one such piece, in a well-explored region, has archaeologists a little baffled. The team’s findings have been published in Archaeological Prospection.

The iconic, “upside-down” baobab tree first emerged on the island of Madagascar, new research into its tangled evolutionary history reveals. It’s still not clear, however, how it jumped from Madagascar to Australia. See the new study, which was published Wednesday (May 15) in the journal Nature.