Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a surprisingly large population of faint, low-mass stars in distant galaxies, suggesting some of the early Universe’s biggest galaxies may contain up to four times more stellar mass than previously estimated. These Webb images show massive galaxies studied by Cheng et al. Image credit: Chloe Cheng. “These galaxies are...

New research puts stringent limits on the unknown ‘material’ responsible for Venus’ dark ultraviolet markings, suggesting it must absorb sunlight with remarkable efficiency or exist in unusually high concentrations. Venus in real colors, processed from Mariner 10 images. Image credit: Mattias Malmer / NASA. At visible wavelengths, Venus appears serene and pale yellow. But since the 1920s, astronomers...

Long before Europeans arrived, cacao (Theobroma cacao) may have traveled far beyond its Central and South American homeland to reach Etowah, a major Mississippian-period city in what is now Georgia. An artist’s conception of Etowah, a Mississippian culture site located on the banks of the Etowah River in Bartow County, Georgia. Image credit: Herb Roe / Sci.News. “For decades archaeologists, historians,...

Using lasers, computer models and AI, researchers reconstructed the calls of 165-million-year-old relatives of modern crickets and katydids from fossilized wing fragments found in China; one of these fossil insects called at frequencies beyond human hearing, challenging the long-held assumption that bat predation was what pushed insects into the ultrasonic realm. “Very little is known about the...

In a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) exposed to a brood-killing fungus shifted their foraging habits toward nectar laced with a natural antimicrobial compound, offering a rare glimpse of behavior consistent with self-medication in a social insect. Debeuckelaere et al. used robotic flowers to test the hypothesis that bumblebees...

A team of physicists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has found that a steady stream of sound waves can shield a fragile quantum bit from its own noisy surroundings, nearly tripling how long it holds information. The breakthrough paves a path toward sound-based quantum networks on chips as well as hybrid quantum systems that combine many different types of...

Researchers at the University of South Carolina have developed a nanoparticle-based treatment that appears to improve performance on standard memory and learning tests as well as reduce brain inflammation and levels of amyloid-beta in mice with Alzheimer’s disease by converting star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes into functioning neurons. Alzheimer’s disease remains irreversible largely...

Neanderthals vanished roughly 42,000 years ago, but a piece of their biology appears to be quietly at work in some people today, according to a new study led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Aspects of Neanderthal anatomy live on in people today. Image credit: Holger Neumann / Neanderthal Museum. “Neanderthals are the most well-known among archaic human...

Zircon crystals and impact-altered minerals show that a massive asteroid slammed into what is now the Pilbara region of Western Australia about 3 billion years ago. The North Pole Dome crater: (A) simplified map of the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT, Western Australia), showing Paleoarchean granite domes (pink) and greenstone belts (greens and blues); the North Pole Dome (NPD) lies near the terrane center;...

Researchers at the University of South Carolina have developed a nanoparticle-based treatment that appears to improve performance on standard memory and learning tests as well as reduce brain inflammation and levels of amyloid-beta in mice with Alzheimer’s disease by converting star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes into functioning neurons. Alzheimer’s disease remains irreversible largely...