Some 300,000 years ago, an early hunter dropped a 30-inch stick in wet mud, and there it stayed through the Last Ice Age, two world wars and the dawning of the internet. The literal stick-in-the-mud remained in excellent condition, considering the amount of time, although it suffered some fungal and root damage.A new study has unearthed the stick and determines that it was once used as a hunting weapon and thrown like a boomerang.Read More: Ancient Humans Mapped Out Hunting Device on BouldersAnc ...read more

When a Manhattan parking garage collapsed in April this year, rescuers were reluctant to stay in the damaged building, fearing further danger. So they used a combination of flying drones and a doglike walking robot to inspect the damage, look for survivors and make sure the site was safe for human rescuers to return.Despite the robot dog falling over onto its side while walking over a pile of rubble — a moment that became internet-famous — New York Mayor Eric Adams called the robots a succ ...read more

Planets form from dust and gas. But how, exactly? Under the more popular accretion model, they accrete over millions of years as one particle collides with another.Under the not-so-popular gravitational instability model, something more decisive occurs. Dust and fragments gather in an area until they undergo a kind of gravitational collapse. The force pulling them together becomes greater than whatever is keeping them apart, and a new planet begins to coalesce.Capturing a Collapse?A new image re ...read more

Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, a small tube-shaped animal that grows on the shells of hermit crabs, is a wonder of regeneration. Cut off its head and mouth, and it grows new ones. Cut off its body, and it regrows that, too.How does it accomplish such feats? A new paper provides a rough outline and comes to a surprising conclusion, that the cellular aging process, known as senescence, plays a pivotal role by working in reverse. What’s more, the paper says that while the aging process first evol ...read more

In 2020, artist Nicole Cooper was conducting research for a painting series when she stumbled upon a NASA chart showing temperature rise throughout history. “I had this realization of, ‘Look at how fast temperatures are rising — and what are we going to do about it?” she said.Cooper experienced what she described as an existential crisis, feeling terrified of what would happen in her lifetime and worried that it may already be too late to act.“I needed to be able to talk,” s ...read more

Doctors and the public incorrectly diagnose countless suspicious red bumps and rashes as spider bites every year.Of these, much of the blame falls on the brown recluse, a somewhat drab, venomous spider native to parts of the U.S. Yet, brown recluse bites are actually quite rare, says Rick Vetter, a retired professor of entomology at the University of California Riverside. These misdiagnoses not only unfairly demonize spiders minding their own business, but they can also distract from other seri ...read more

The Trinity Nuclear Test on 16 July 1945 is a key incident in the blockbuster Oppenheimer movie and in the history of humankind. Many scientists think it marks the beginning of the Anthropocene, a new geological era characterized by humanity’s influence on the Earth. That’s because Trinity’s radioactive fallout will forever appear in the geological record, creating a unique signature of human activity that can be precisely dated. But there’s a problem. In 1945, radioactive monitoring te ...read more

The sci-fi landscape is littered with wormholes. From Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Rick and Morty to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, these theoretical constructs allow characters to zip between distant points in the universe as easy as stepping through a doorway. An Einstein-Rosen bridge is the simplest kind of wormhole. And while it can, in theory, allow you to meet a new friend from a distant part of the universe, there are some important reasons why it won’t let you tr ...read more