Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Ancient humans used bone tools a million years earlier than we thought

    Bones that appear to have been fashioned into tools date back 1.5 million yearsCSIC
    Ancient humans were regularly making tools out of animal bones 1.5 million years ago – more than a million years earlier than previously thought. This indicates that they could adapt the techniques they used to make stone tools to repurpose bone, a very different material.
    It also raises the question of why there is no record of people consistently making bone tools for another million years. Have examples in that gap not been preserved or discovered, or did people abandon them in favour of something better?… More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The Milky Way’s black hole is constantly bubbling

    The black hole at the Milky Way’s heart neither slumbers nor sleeps. Instead, the ring of plasma surrounding it flickers constantly, punctuated by superbright flares, observations show.

    Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe Sgr A* and its disk for hours at a time over the course of a year, from April 2023 through April 2024. These were the longest continuous observations yet of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.

    The telescope revealed a “constant bubbling” in the disk’s light that changed every few seconds or minutes, says astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. A few times a day, and seemingly at random, the disk would emit a blindingly bright flare, Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues report in the Feb. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Citizen scientists make cosmic discoveries with a global telescope network

    In January in Monterrey, Mexico, Iván Venzor was one of only a dozen people in the world to glimpse a potential Jupiter-sized planet crossing in front of a distant star.

    It happened too fast to see by eye — just a seconds-long flicker of light — but Venzor’s backyard telescope recorded the data, allowing him to verify the event with researchers. “I’m having dinner with my family, and I’m trying to discover a new kind of planet from a few meters outside,” says Venzor, a hobby astronomer. “It’s effortless.” More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The universe’s first supernovas probably produced water

    The first generation of stars in the universe could have produced significant amounts of water upon their deaths, just 100 million to 200 million years after the Big Bang.

    Signatures of water have previously been observed some 780 million years after the Big Bang. But now, computer simulations suggest that this essential condition for life existed far earlier than astronomers thought, researchers report March 3 in Nature Astronomy.

    “The surprise was that the ingredients for life were all in place in dense cloud cores [leftover after stellar deaths] so early after the Big Bang,” says astrophysicist Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth in England. More

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    in Humans

    Ancient ancestor of the plague discovered in Bronze Age sheep

    Yersinia pestis bacteria viewed with an electron microscopeConnect Images/Alamy
    An ancient ancestor of the pathogen that would later cause the Black Death and other major pandemics has been identified in a Bronze Age domestic sheep in Russia – making it one of the oldest pathogens ever found in an animal.
    Its DNA closely matches that of plague bacteria found in European human skeletons from the same period, providing the first evidence that the disease could have spread between humans and their own livestock well before the pathogen evolved to jump from rodents to people via fleas. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Some of Earth’s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system

    Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system — and even producing a few meteors in our sky.

    Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org. More

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    in Humans

    A man’s brain was turned into glass by the eruption of Vesuvius

    A sample of organic glass found inside the skull of a man from HerculaneumPier Paolo Petrone
    The eruption of Mount Vesuvius around 2000 years ago caused one man’s brain to explode and turned the fragments to glass. The discovery is the only known instance of soft tissue turning to glass and sheds new light on how eruptions kill – and how we might protect people.
    The volcanic disaster struck in AD 79, burying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae in thick layers of ash that eventually solidified. At least 1500 bodies and thousands of ancient papyrus scrolls have… More

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    in Humans

    From doomy prophecies to epic dystopias, we are suckers for end times

    We may live in an age of doomscrolling, but we can keep wild, apocalyptic thinking at bayStephen Taylor/Alamy
    A Brief History of the End of the F*cking WorldTom Phillips (Wildfire)
    In 1950s Chicago, aliens from the planet Clarion made contact with Dorothy Martin. They warned her of a “holocaust of the coming events” that would begin on 21 December, 1954. Lake Michigan would subsume Chicago, and the rest of the world would follow into oblivion. Martin and her followers would be airlifted to safety on Clarion via flying saucers – but only if they first removed all… More