Science

The story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by males strutting, brawling and shagging, with females just along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language. The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitutes one …

Their Last Love Token: A Dinosaur Rebuilt From Its Excavated Bones  The New York Times Source link

Stone tools discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting what experts thought they knew about human evolution in this region. The tools date to about 1 million to 1.5 million years ago, which suggests that Sulawesi was occupied by an unknown human relative long before our species evolved. “These are simple, sharp-edged flakes of stone that would have …

The Royal Society has been publishing more than half of its content open-access by charging article-processing fees.Credit: Nigel Bowles/Alamy The UK Royal Society is converting eight of its journals to the ‘subscribe to open’ (S2O) publishing model, starting next year. The not-for-profit publisher, which produces ten titles, including the world’s first peer-reviewed journals, announced the decision today. The S2O model …

A landmark on Pluto that was previously designated as an impact crater may actually be the caldera of a supervolcano that has exploded in the past few million years, new research suggests. When NASA’s New Horizons mission flew by Pluto in 2015, it revealed a geologically rich world, rather than the cold, dark landscape many had anticipated. Almost immediately, researchers …

Underwhelming performance The task in this case is predicting how gene activity might change when genes are altered. When an individual gene is lost or activated, it’s possible that the only messenger RNA that is altered is the one made by that gene. But some genes encode proteins that regulate a collection of other genes, in which case you might …

Wavy Dave the robot crustacean has been showing scientists how male fiddler crabs respond when they see a fellow crab waving. Famous for their enormous claws, the team made Wavy Dave blend in by giving him a huge claw of his own, only for it to get ripped off by a male crab. Before he was struck down, Wavy Dave’s …

In a theory that challenges what we know about aging, João Pedro de Magalhães, a molecular biogerontologist at the University of Birmingham, suggests humans may be biologically capable of living much longer than we do now—possibly 1,000 years or more. But there’s a catch: we may have evolved to age faster, and the reason traces back to the Age of …

Thirteen years into its mission, NASA’s Curiosity rover is still uncovering Martian mysteries — and learning to do more with less. Since landing in Gale Crater in 2012, Curiosity has traveled more than 22 miles (35 kilometers), studying rock layers, analyzing soil and revealing Mars’ ancient past, including signs that the planet once harbored liquid water, a thicker atmosphere and …

Sunspot region 4168 is certainly making quite a name for itself! Earlier this week, active region 4168 churned out three M-class flares within 24 hours, ending weeks of calm on the sun. Then, on Aug. 5, it fired off a strong M4.4-class flare, peaking at 11:58 a.m. EDT (15:58 GMT), and hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. But though …