Tech news stories

The team says the result marks a milestone in our ability to determine the ages of old stars and use them as living fossils to study the Milky Way’s distant past. This investigative technique makes it possible to analyze thousands of ancient stars in our galaxy, reconstructing the Milky Way’s evolution over billions of years. The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A University of Maryland-led team of astronomers found that while the mission successfully proved that kinetic impactors like the DART spacecraft can alter an asteroid’s path, the resulting ejected boulders created forces in unexpected directions that could complicate future deflection efforts. According to the team’s new paper published in the Planetary Science Journal on July 4, 2025, using asteroid deflection for planetary defense is likely far more complex than researchers initially understood.

French and Egyptian researchers are making a “digital twin” of the Lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt after lifting its ancient submerged blocks out of the Mediterranean Sea.

A study published in the Astrophysical Journal opens a new window into investigations of stars through this stellar music.

Five millennia ago, wealth inequality—which had stayed roughly constant for thousands of years—exploded. It has stayed constant, albeit much higher, ever since…One factor, Bowles and Bocconi University economic historian Mattia Fochesato write in a paper recently published in the Journal of Economic Literature, was the ox-drawn plow.

Published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, the findings contradict a widely cited fracture model that credited rock core geometry and stiffness with flaking patterns and predicted that hammer strike angle would have minimal effect on flake formation. Results suggest a greater degree of cognitive control by early human tool makers than previously recognized.

Thought to be more than 2,000 years old, the Antikythera mechanism is widely considered the first computer in history, an analog calculator that was way ahead of its time… or was it? The research has yet to be peer-reviewed or published in a journal, but is available on the preprint server arXiv.

A team using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and a supercomputer to try to better understand the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy, created the largest 3D map of the universe as part of this endeavour. And it has just made this map publicly available.

The ancient peoples of the Philippines and of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) may have built sophisticated boats and mastered seafaring tens of thousands of years ago—millennia before Magellan, Zheng He, and even the Polynesians. The paper was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

A 2,000-year-old Herculaneum scroll buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is filled with lost words that scholars can now decipher thanks to AI and a particle accelerator.

Advanced artificial intelligence is to revolutionise fundamental physics and could open a window on to the fate of the universe, according to Cern’s next director general.

The idea of lightsails is something out of science fiction. As early as the 1950s and ‘60s, science fiction writers John Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke and others were toying with the idea of “solar sails” for spacecraft propulsion…Project researchers report in a paper published in Nature Photonics that they have developed a platform to test the materials that could one day form lightsails.

Our research has revealed that the femur’s contents are arguably the oldest multi-component arrow poison in the world. It’s a complex recipe combining at least two toxic plant ingredients. There’s also evidence of a third toxin.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been exploring Mars since 2012 and more recently has found evidence of ice-free ancient ponds and lakes on the surface. The rover found small undulations like those seen in sandy lakebeds on Earth.

AI promises to accelerate scientific discovery, but if scientists aren’t careful public trust may be left behind.

Around 900,000 years ago stone tech 2.0 was released into Spain. University of Santiago de Compostela anthropologist Diego Lombao and colleagues found the earliest known European example of advanced stone tool techniques. This research was published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.