The worlds oldest figurative artwork from Borneo dated to a minimum of 40,000 years. (Credit: Luc-Henri Fage) The oldest known figurative cave art painting in the world may be a 40,000-year-old rendering of a species of wild cattle found in a Borneo cave by a group of Griffith University researchers. It is considerably older than a 35,400-year-old pig-deer painting discovered by the same team a few years ago in a cave located on Sulawesi, another island in Indonesia. These recen ...read more

Air bubbles trapped in a thin ice core slice. (Credit: Tas van Ommen/Australian Antarctic Division) “Don’t forget to write!” Friends and loved ones bid adieu to members of the latest research team to begin the long trek to Antarctica this weekend. The goal of this latest expedition, which is scheduled to return mid-February, is to see whether concentrations of an atmospheric molecule called hydroxyl, or OH, has changed over time since the industrial revolution. The answe ...read more

An artist’s impression of the hot white dwarf GALEXJ014636.8+323615 (white) and its ultra-hot magnetosphere (purple) trapped with the magnetic field (green). (Credit: Nicole Reindl) Some 1,200 light-years from Earth, an international team of astronomers has discovered an ultra-hot magnetosphere, or magnetic field, surrounding a sun-like star. The star, dubbed GALEXJ014636.8+323615, is a white dwarf, the dense core of a dead star. “White dwarfs are the remnants of about 95 perc ...read more

Scientists used ultrasound to deliver a drug to a rat, like the one captured here. (Credit: Pan Xunbin/shutterstock) At least 50 million people worldwide live with epilepsy. For nearly one-third of those people, anti-seizure medications don’t work. Surgery to remove the part of the brain that causes epileptic fits is an option for some, but the intrusive treatment might not work. It could also lead to memory and language problems, among other complications. Now researchers from Stanford ...read more

The second Nemi ship emerges from the lake. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) For centuries, the medieval fishermen who sailed in the placid waters of Lake Nemi, 19 miles south of Rome, knew a secret. It was said that the rotting timbers of a gigantic ancient shipwreck lurked below the water’s quiet surface. But the lake was tiny, with an area of only 0.6 square miles. And with no other body of water connected to it, what could a vessel of that size be doing there? Still, the stories about the ...read more

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The bionic mushroom created by the researchers. (Credit: American Chemical Society) “Power mushrooms” sounds like something out of Super Mario, but a lab in New Jersey has made them a reality. Hoping to create a new source of renewable energy (and to test out some ideas), a team at the Stevens Institute of Technology engineered a symbiotic relationship between the common button mushroom, some cyanobacteria and a few electrodes made of “graphene nanoribbons” (GNRs) &mdas ...read more

Bugs are consuming pharmaceutical drugs pumped into streams, which then end up in the systems of predators, like the platypus. (Credit: John Carnemolla/shutterstock) Humans don’t absorb 100 percent of the drugs we consume. The pharmaceuticals that our bodies don’t use are flushed out of our systems and flushed down into sewage systems, processed in water treatment plants, and finally dumped into streams and other waterways. But an alarming number of pharmaceutical compounds aren&rs ...read more