Tech news stories

With today’s technology, we cannot bring back Neanderthals. But even if future advances allow it, should we?

An astoundingly detailed weevil on a single grain of rice takes first place in 2025’s Nikon Small World photomicrography competition.

In experiments, their newly created model was able to directly communicate with a biological neuron in a remarkably lifelike, ‘quiet’ way. The study was published in Nature Communications.

New research, published in the journal Icarus, just revealed 63 newly discovered young asteroid families less than around 10 million years old. While many of these young families are likely to exist in our solar system, only 43 had been previously documented.

Scientists at the University of Illinois have discovered that poorly aimed asteroid deflection attempts could accidentally steer space rocks through dangerous regions in space known as “gravitational keyholes” that would alas, still mean they hit Earth, just years or decades later!

Until now, the mainstream view has been that stars and galaxies appeared first and that black holes were created only when the earliest stars ran out of fuel and collapsed under their own gravity. But the latest observations by the space telescope, which reveal a gargantuan black hole with only a sparse halo of surrounding material dating back to the dawn of the cosmos, appear incompatible with this sequence of events

New data from the James Webb telescope suggests that Bennu and Ryugu — two asteroids recently visited by sample-return missions — are both fragments of a single massive “parent”. See the findings in a new study, published Aug. 18 in The Planetary Science Journal.

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.