The Dolní Vestonice Portrait Head is just 2 inches tall and 1 inch wide. It’s a tiny face carved into an ivory mammoth tusk, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in significance. Uncovered in the 1920s in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic, the figure, which dates back 26,000 years, is thought to be the oldest known personal portrait.During the late Paleolithic Period, a group of mammoth-hunting ancient humans set up camp in the Dolní Věstonice region of what is now the C ...read more

Did the chemical components necessary to create water on Earth come from space or already exist here? One prevailing notion holds that asteroids containing either water of its building blocks bombarded the planet. But now, a team of researchers have produced evidence that those building blocks were here since early in the planet’s history, according to a study published in the journal Icarus.Pinpointing when and where Earth’s hydrogen is an essential key to understanding how life arose on th ...read more

Sauerkraut packs a punch, and not just for your taste buds. Famous for its tangy, sour, and slightly salty taste, sauerkraut has long been noted for being both nutritious and healthy, having been tied to a host of anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-carcinogenic activities. Now, a new study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology adds additional support to sauerkraut’s healthiness, showing that the topping may help out your gut, possibly thanks to its wealth of metabolic products, or me ...read more

A child’s bedroom should be a safe haven where they can get enough sleep to develop properly, but many bedrooms contain a hidden danger that is sure to make parents weary. A recent pair of studies has revealed the prevalence of harmful chemicals that are slipping into bedrooms through the mattresses children sleep on. The studies show that babies and young children are at risk of breathing in and absorbing chemicals as they sleep. These chemicals — including plasticizers called phthalates a ...read more

For people with food allergies, even a simple dinner out can become stressful. Figuring out whether every ingredient is listed on the menu and asking the server a dozen questions are necessary steps just to avoid dishes that might seem harmless to most, but can be dangerous — even fatal — to someone with allergies.A bite of something containing peanuts, shellfish, soy, or wheat can lead to anything from mild itching to vomiting or even difficulty breathing. At the moment, managing food aller ...read more

The amount of matter present in the universe simply hasn’t added up. Astronomers accounting for all the normal matter in the universe that makes up stars, galaxies, and gasses have fallen far short of the amount they should find produced by the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago.About 85 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter. The remaining 15 percent is the more conventional kind — much of which builds the things we can see in space, like stars and planets. Of that, about half has b ...read more

Seeing human-like robots, dolls, and AI-generated faces can trigger eerie, put-off feelings towards the figure, a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. Though these figures look almost human, there is just something slightly off about them. It could be the unblinking eyes, unnatural stillness, or — for AI-generated figures — poorly synced facial and lip movements. Recently, researchers from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany, have noticed AI-generated avata ...read more

Fire is one of the building blocks of human life. Whether for providing warmth, cooking food, casting light, or assisting in the creation of the first tools, fire has been responsible for much of the progress our ancestors made that helped modern humanity get to where we are today.If we want to make a fire, it’s simple. Grab some wood from the corner store, set it up in your backyard fire pit, and strike a match. But how did our Ice Age ancestors do it? There actually isn’t much in the archa ...read more

Dean Cliver, an expert in food microbiology at the University of California Davis, was the OG of cutting-board research. In the early 1990s, Cliver, who died in 2011, and his colleagues set out to discover how home cooks could clean their wooden cutting boards so that wooden boards would be as safe to use as the plastic variety. But the results of their experiments showed that the plastic boards weren’t necessarily safer than the wooden ones. Or to be more precise, under the same experimental ...read more

Patterns exist all around the world, creating unforgettable designs exhibited by organisms and acts of nature. Some of these designs even share surprising connections, like a spiral shape seen in both marine mollusks and a newly discovered structure of light that moves like a vortex. A recent study found that the movement of this light vortex — called an optical rotatum — occurs in a way that is very similar to the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical concept behind many of nature’s most i ...read more