Ocean heat plus human-caused global warming is a grim recipe for deadly climate extremes. Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of…
Distinct form of tooth protein in Homo erectus shows up in Denisovans—and us. Humanity’s ancestry has grown far clearer thanks to our ability to obtain ancient DNA. We now know that, as humans left Africa, they interbred with the groups they met there, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Evidence from the…
The type of bar matters when it comes to how it bends and recoils, but why is still a mystery. Olympic weightlifting consists of three basic movements performed on a barbell: the snatch, the clean, and the jerk (with the latter two executed in combination). At such an elite…
“Every time I go to the dentist, I think about that guy,” researcher says. The world’s first dentist was a Neanderthal, according to a recent study. 59,000 years ago in what’s now southwestern Siberia, a Neanderthal had a toothache. It must have been a doozy because they were desperate…
Early galaxy has elements produced by the Universe’s first supernovae. For decades, astronomers looking through telescopes like Hubble have been trying to catch a glimpse of the ancient epoch when the Universe’s first generation of stars ignited. But the small galaxies that were the building blocks of the cosmos…
SpaceX cleared an important milestone Monday on the road to launching a new version of Starship. For the third time in three years, SpaceX has stacked a new version of its enormous Starship rocket on a launch pad in South Texas, just a few miles north of the US-Mexico…
Evidence is growing that sperm carries marks of a father’s life experiences, influencing traits in offspring. On a bright afternoon in Jiangsu, China, Xin Yin is playing personal trainer to some mice. One by one, he sets the rodents on a miniature treadmill that starts slow and gradually speeds…
Fortunately, it happened early in the morning, so nobody was around. At 5:26 am local time on August 10, 2025, a massive wedge of rock with a volume of at least 63.5 million cubic meters detached from a mountain above Alaska’s Tracy Arm fjord. The falling rock plummeted into…
It’s hard to mix electronic manufacturing and flexible geometry. To get quantum computing to work, we will ultimately need lots of high-quality qubits, which we can tie together into groups of error-corrected logical qubits. Companies are taking distinct approaches to get there, but you can think of them as…
Testing shows rotor blades won’t disintegrate when they spin at supersonic speed. A little more than three years since NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter ended its pioneering mission at Mars, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are designing next-generation Martian rotorcraft to carry heavier payloads longer distances through the planet’s…
