“It’s the first direct evidence of how the tools were used,” says Nowell. “All of a sudden, a wealth of information is unlocked.”
Detecting species by protein residues on stone tools is especially important for once-marshy sites, like Shishan, which are not conducive to bone preservation.Although the Shishan excavations have yet to determine which species of hominin was at the site, Nowell’s team found that they were eating everything from Asian elephant and r ...read more
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Long before recent political turmoil across the pond came to a head, Britain made a literal break for it and physically separated from mainland Europe. Now, researchers have an idea of how the process went down some 450,000 years ago.
A new study from Imperial College London and other European institutes supports the claim that before the English Channel existed, a large chalk ridge connected Britain and France. The ridge acted as a dam, holding back a lake that had formed in front of a nearby g ...read more
Errors in the use of spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel could pose risks for science.
That’s according to a preprint posted on arXiv from Ghada AlTarawneh and Simon Thorne of Cardiff Metropolitan University.
AlTarawneh and Thorne conducted a survey of 17 researchers from the University of Newcastle neuroscience research centre, ranging from PhD students to senior researchers. None of the respondants had any formal, certified training in spreadsheet use, with most (71%) being self-taught ...read more
KELT-11b, one of the physically largest objects known, is 40 percent wider than Jupiter and has the density of styrofoam. (Credit: Walter Robinson/Lehigh University)
Last week, a team of astronomers reported the first potential discovery of an exomoon–a satellite orbiting a planet around another star. Part of what is so striking about the report is the scale of this possible planet-moon system. In this case, the “moon” appears to be about the size of Neptune; the planet it or ...read more
(Credit: Irina Kozorog/Shutterstock)
An ant without a sense of smell is an ant that’s lost.
After creating ants that had been genetically modified to lack a sense of smell, scientists watched them wander away from their colonies, steal food, refuse to mate and fail to tend to eggs — antisocial behavior that contradicts the hive-mind mentality of most ant communities.
It’s likely not because of any sociopathic tendencies on the ant’s part, but because they’ve been ...read more
The solar eclipse seen from Gemini 12. NASA.
The Gemini program was sort of NASA’s overlooked middle child. It didn’t have the excitement of being the first time American astronauts flew in space like the Mercury did, and it didn’t have the glamour of going to the Moon like Apollo. Which means most people don’t know it happened. But the Gemini program was how NASA learned to fly in space, to perform rendezvous and docking maneuvers, change orbits, and test all ...read more
A genetic rescue project has restored the pink pigeon population from just 12 birds to over 400 today. (Vikash Tatayah/Mauritian Wildlife Foundation)
“Voldemort outlived Harry Potter,” Christelle Ferriere tells me as we walk around the small, uninhabited island of Ile aux Aigrettes, off the east coast of Mauritius. “Whoever bands them gets to name them,” she explains. Ferriere is a bird expert with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF) and the fantastical beasts she w ...read more
