As far as Lower Paleolithic archaeology goes, this is quite the haul: Experts have uncovered a record 98 elephant-bone tools at a site dating back some 400,000 years. In a new study, University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues surveyed tools excavated from a site in...
In April this year, Nasa’s Ingenuity helicopter made history when it undertook its first flight in the Martian atmosphere, rising some 10 feet above the planet’s surface. It was humankind’s first successful attempt at flying a powered aircraft in another world. Now, according to a Reuters report, China has developed...
Life as we know it took a pretty funky turn around 541 million years ago. That’s when a period called the Cambrian emerged, and with it, the so-called Cambrian explosion ushered in practically all major groups of animals. It lasted for about 25 million years and resulted in the...
In 1916, Albert Einstein put the finishing touches on his Theory of General Relativity, a journey that began in 1905 with his attempts to reconcile Newton’s own theories of gravitation with the laws of electromagnetism. Once complete, Einstein’s theory provided a unified description of gravity as a geometric property...
In 2019, a lake on an ice sheet in East Antarctica vanished completely over the course of three days. The strange occurrence went unnoticed until the next summer, when Dr. Roland Warner, a glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania, noticed discrepancies in satellite images...
Singapore researchers have developed a smart foam material that allows robots to sense nearby objects, and repairs itself when damaged, just like human skin. Artificially innervated foam, or AiFoam, is a highly elastic polymer created by mixing fluoropolymer with a compound that lowers surface tension. This allows the spongy...
French researchers have found that an unusual fish, the coelacanth, can live up to a century, doesn't fully mature until it reaches age 45, and spends years in the womb. Coelacanths are nicknamed, "living fossils." Previously, it was estimated that the coelacanth was a fast-growing fish that lived for about...
The puzzling findings of a telescope designed and built by researchers at the University of British Columbia are being shared with the astronomical community for further analysis. The CHIME telescope detected 535 new fast radio bursts during its first year of operation – from 2018 to 2019 – quadrupling the...
An international research team has described a new species of Oculudentavis, providing further evidence that the animal first identified as a hummingbird-sized dinosaur was actually a lizard. The new species, named Oculudentavis naga in honor of the Naga people of Myanmar and India, is represented by a partial skeleton that...
China's Zhurong rover has sent back its first batch of scientific images since its historic landing on May 15, when China became the second nation to successfully land a rover on Mars. From an epic panorama to a detailed look at Mars's topography and some impressive-looking wheelies by the...