Nearly a hundred stone tools excavated from multiple layers at a site in China point to hominins — our ancestors and closest kin — being in East Asia about 2.1 million years ago. The find is the oldest evidence of hominins outside of Africa by more than 200,000 years and begs the question: what species made them? Hominins are those species in the greater primate family tree that are more closely related to us than to other apes. That includes members of ou ...read more

Francis Ford Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg: all directors who’ve had a string of successes in their careers. Hot streaks like these stretch beyond the realm of movie directors, though. Athletes, gamblers, musicians — the list could go on. Regardless of your niche, what’s going on that spurs these back-to-back wins? And when are they most likely to strike? To try and find out, an international group of researchers looked at ...read more

Four billion years ago, an immense galaxy with a black hole at its heart spewed forth a jet of particles at nearly the speed of light. One of those particles, a neutrino that is just a fraction of the size of a regular atom, traversed across the universe on a collision course for Earth, finally striking the ice sheet of Antarctica last September. As it hit, a neutrino detector planted by scientists within the ice recorded the neutrino’s charged interaction, causing a blue flas ...read more

Men trying to look good for the ladies might pump iron, but when male mice are regularly exposed to male rivals, it results in thicker penis bones, potentially because wider girth might prove more desirable to females, a new study finds. The intense rivalry between males over females has helped drive the evolution of many extraordinary male traits, from peacock plumes to the gigantic antlers of the extinct Irish elk. Evolutionary biologist Gonçalo Igreja André at the U ...read more

By his baby bawls, we may know the next James Earl Jones. According to a team of scientists from the United Kingdom and France, babies’ cries may accurately predict their voice pitch later in life. This, researchers say, is an indication that your golden pipes were tuned long before puberty, potentially even in the womb. What we do with this information is unclear, but their finding is certainly worthy of adding to the your-body-is-a-fortune-teller collection. You know the ...read more

We have swarms of scientists searching the skies for space oddities, but it's rare that they actually find one in the act of plunging to Earth. On June 23, a group of international geoscientists discovered a meteorite in Botswana that had been dwelling in space just weeks earlier. The fresh fragment broke off of asteroid 2018 LA as it plummeted to Earth on June 2, turning into a fiery meteor and exploding as it entered our atmosphere. Treasure Hunt The geoscientists spent five day ...read more

My doctor recently declared me deficient in vitamin D and prescribed a weekly pill. Because I take care to eat a healthy and diverse diet, I was a bit annoyed. She said it was no big deal and actually very common, the medical equivalent of a parent telling a child, “Because I said so.� Later on, I was grousing to some of my friends and many of them said they had gotten the same news.  It made me wonder: What is going on with vitamin D? A Vexing ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. You probably do it. It might be ingrained from when you were a kid, and now it’s almost automatic. You see the flash of lightning – and you immediately start counting the seconds till it thunders. But does counting really get you a good estimate for how far away the lightning is? Is this one of those old wives’ tales, or is it actually based on science? In this case, we h ...read more

Cancer survivors often go through hell to earn the prize of simply returning to a somewhat normal life — none more so than children. But even after the cancer is gone, many young patients are still at risk for another kind of medical difficulty. Endocrine disorders, a class of issues characterized by hormone imbalances and including hyperthyroidism and metabolic disorders, are far more common among those who have survived cancer, two papers published late last month show. Ir ...read more

Spaceflight is like backpacking. If you can’t restock supplies like food and water along the way, how far you can travel is limited by how much you can carry. And in space, you also have to worry about having enough fuel for your spacecraft and breathable air for your crew. That’s why some researchers are looking toward technology that they call artificial photosynthesis -- a way of harnessing the sun's light to generate fuel and breathable air for longer m ...read more