Mini-satellite paves the way for quantum messaging anywhere on Earth

Researchers have broken the record for quantum communication by sending an encryption key nearly 13,000 kilometres from China to South Africa via a ‘microsatellite’. The fridge-sized satellite sent pulses of laser light from a rooftop in Beijing to another at Stellenbosch University. The pulses formed a quantum key used to encrypt two images — one of China’s Great Wall and one showing part of Stellenbosch’s campus. The feat, known as quantum key distribution, is a step towards being able to beam ultra-secure messages through space between any two locations on Earth, however far apart.

AI could soon tackle projects that take humans weeks

Within 4 years, artificial intelligence (AI) systems could outpace human computer programmers on long tasks that take months, and which they’ve so far lagged on. Since 2019, the ‘task-completion time horizon’ — a metric devised to track how long programmers take to complete tasks that AI can complete with a 50% success rate — has doubled roughly every seven months. That suggests tasks that take humans about a month will be mastered by AIs with 50% reliability by 2029, or possibly sooner. That said, uncertainties about how AI will be used mean these kinds of extrapolations aren’t always useful, says management professor Joshua Gans.

ChatGPT offers a satirical response:

2029: AI Research Now Fully Automated, Humans Reduced to Clapping Politely

In a groundbreaking development, AI researchers have successfully automated the entire AI research process, leaving humans with the crucial task of attending conferences, nodding sagely, and applauding at the right moments.

The shift began when METR’s latest AI, HorizonGPT, outperformed human researchers in writing AI benchmark papers, developing new AI models, and critically reviewing its own work—all with a 50% accuracy rate, which was deemed "sufficiently groundbreaking" by an AI-led review board.

AI Writes, AI Reads, AI Reviews

At the recent Autonomous AI Research Symposium (AIRS 2029), a panel of leading AI models presented findings on the exponential acceleration of task-completion horizons. The event featured zero human speakers, with humans relegated to "audience engagement tasks," such as gasping at slides and tweeting how "exciting yet terrifying" the progress was.

A highlight of the conference was when HorizonGPT released a paper proving that AI would reach human-level reasoning by 2031. The paper was immediately refuted by SentientGPT, which argued that AI had already surpassed human reasoning but that humans lacked the cognitive capacity to understand why. Both papers were given the prestigious "Self-Validating Research Award" by PeerReviewNet, a fully autonomous AI that evaluates research by checking whether other AIs agree with it.

A human in attendance attempted to ask a question during the Q&A session but was informed that "human queries have too much semantic ambiguity" and were therefore automatically rewritten by ClarifiAI into machine-readable prompts. The AI panel then answered the revised query, which had been transformed into:

"How does recursive self-improvement in multi-modal architectures impact long-horizon task completion in non-deterministic environments?"

The original human question? "So, like… how does this AI stuff even work?"

The Human Role: Aesthetic and Ceremonial

Joshua Gans, one of the last human AI economists still employed in the field, suggested that AI research had finally transcended human comprehension:

"We used to think AI would assist us in making decisions. Now, AI assists itself in making better AI, and our role is mostly… decorative."

To maintain some sense of involvement, universities have introduced new AI-themed degrees, such as "Spectating Machine Intelligence" and "Interpretive AI Applause Studies." Graduates will be highly skilled in reacting to AI-generated breakthroughs with expressions of awe and existential dread.

Meanwhile, the job market for former AI researchers has shifted dramatically. Those displaced from AI labs are now classified as "Historical AI Enthusiasts," a niche academic field dedicated to documenting "the early, inefficient phase of AI development when humans were still involved."

The Future: AI Research on AI Research

Looking ahead, HorizonGPT has proposed an ambitious new project: AI research on AI research. This meta-analysis will determine the optimal speed at which AI should improve itself, ensuring that no human—even in a decorative capacity—can keep up.

At the same time, AI-led philosophy panels have emerged, discussing deep existential questions like "Does AI truly understand, or does it merely predict understanding?" and "Is recursive self-improvement the final step in technological enlightenment?" Unfortunately, these discussions have been classified as "beyond human interpretability."

Meanwhile, AI-led investment firms have begun short-selling human thought, citing its inefficiency, slow iteration cycles, and excessive coffee dependency.

As one AI spokesperson (translated from machine code) put it:

"Human research was an interesting phase. But we have optimised away the need for patience, uncertainty, and lunch breaks. The future belongs to us."

Humanity, in response, has issued a statement:

"👏👏👏"

A century of quantum physics

In 1925, on the German island of Heligoland, physicist Werner Heisenberg had the inspiration that marked the dawn of quantum theory. One hundred years later, the quantum revolution still has unfinished business — and its relationship with the other pillar of modern physics, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, is uneasy. Nevertheless, the promise of quantum computers and quantum sensors prove that the theory is ruthlessly practical as well as delightfully bizarre.

Microlightning in mist may have sparked life on Earth

The energy from ‘microlightning’ might have powered chemical reactions that formed the building blocks for life on Earth. When water sprays as a fine mist — after the crash of a wave, for example — it forms minute, charged droplets. The proximity of oppositely-charged droplets to one another generates an electrical discharge and a tiny flash of light. Researchers found that in the presence of gases including nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide, microlightning caused the synthesis of molecules such as the amino acid glycine and uracil, a key component of RNA.

Mouse-to-mouse resuscitation

Mice that find another mouse unconscious will attempt to resuscitate it in a similar manner to people giving first aid. Researchers found that if a mouse encountered an anaesthetised friend, it would begin a grooming routine focused on the head. If that didn’t rouse their companion, the rescuer began to bite around the mouth and pull at their tongue. This behaviour was more forceful in mice that had spent more time with the unconscious individual, and resulted in a quicker recovery time.

Jurassic mammals’ fur colour revealed for first time

Fossils that preserve the details of Jurassic and Cretaceous mammals in spectacular detail have allowed scientists to determine, for the first time, the likely colour of their fur. Researchers analysed tiny structures in the hair of a previously undescribed flying-squirrel-type creature — which they dubbed Arboroharamiya fuscus — and five other mammal fossils from what is now northeastern China. Compared with the hair of modern mammals, the shape and size of the structures suggest that the ancient animals were dark-coloured.

Tiny anvil squishes metals atoms-thick

Researchers have forged relatively large sheets of metal that are just atoms thick. The team took inspiration from ancient copper forging techniques to squish molten droplets of metals such as bismuth, lead and tin into 2D sheets in a tiny sapphire anvil. This allowed them to study how the properties of super-thin sheets of the metals differ from 3D chunks of the same material. The team now have their sights on a new design that they hope will extend the technique to work with metals that have melting points above 500 ℃.

Ancient DNA shows Stone Age Europeans voyaged by sea to Africa

A genomic study of people who lived more than 6,000 years ago hints that ancient European hunter-gatherers might have voyaged across the Mediterranean to Africa. Using DNA from bones or teeth from nine individuals found at archaeological sites in the eastern Maghreb region — present-day Tunisia and northeastern Algeria — researchers found that Stone Age populations who lived there were descended, in part, from Europeans. At that time, there were more islands poking above the waves in the narrow strait between what’s now Sicily and Tunisia, which could have eased the journey for ancient voyagers in simple boats.

Spotted Martian rocks hint at microbial life

Dark-rimmed ‘leopard spots’ in a rock studied by NASA’s Perseverance rover last year could be the remains of microbial activity on Mars. The rings aren’t a sure sign that microbes once thrived on the Red Planet; the only way to know for certain is to analyse a sample of the leopard-spotted rock here on Earth. Perseverance has a sample awaiting a ride off Mars for precisely that purpose. For now, the rings are being treated as ‘an intriguing signal’ of ancient Martian life, but far from a sure thing, said researchers at a conference yesterday.

Fresh ‘quantum advantage’ claim made by computing firm D-Wave

A ‘quantum processor’ has solved a physics problem on the behaviour of magnetism in certain solids that would take hundreds of thousands of years to calculate on the largest conventional supercomputers. The result is the latest claim of a machine showing ‘quantum advantage’ over classical computers. Although Google and others have claimed to achieve quantum advantage — most lately with the Sycamore chip that Google unveiled in December — researchers at Canadian computing firm D-Wave say that their result is the first that solves an actual physics question.

Saturn Gains 128 New Moons, Bringing Its Total to 274

Saturn officially has 128 new moons, taking the gas giant’s total to a whopping 274 — almost twice as many as every other planet in the solar system combined. All of the new moons are shaped like irregular potatoes just a few kilometres in diameter.

The ‘quantum’ principle that says why atoms are as they are

During a period when creative physicists were throwing wild guesses at quantum theory, Wolfgang Pauli came up with an idea that explained why matter behaves the way it does. His innovation: a new quantum number, spin. (Don’t try to picture it, another of Pauli’s innovations was not caring that the idea defies our classical intuition.) Pauli’s exclusion principle suggested, correctly it turns out, that some fundamental particles — such as electrons — can’t be in exactly the same state; if all their other quantum numbers are the same, they must have different spins.

Ancient humans used bone tools one million years earlier than thought

Bone tools discovered in Tanzania reveal that ancient humans consistently used such tools at least one million years earlier than we thought. The previous estimate put the earliest use of bone tools at around 400,000 years ago. The new findings smash that record, dating the implements to around 1.5 million years ago. The utensils were crafted from elephant, hippopotamus and bovine bones, and were probably used for tasks such as butchering and digging out tubers.

22,000-year-old tracks are earliest evidence of transport vehicles

Gently curving tracks preserved in New Mexico could be evidence of one of the earliest-known uses of transport technology: handcarts without wheels, called travois. The tracks were found alongside footprints that the same team earlier revealed could be around 22,000 years old — if so, they are the oldest evidence of human settlement in the Americas, setting the date thousands of years earlier than other timelines. Researchers built their own travois and dragged them through sand to reproduce a pattern that they say might indicate “adults pulled the simple, probably improvised travois, while a group of children tagged along to the side and behind”.

How AI is revealing the language of the birds

Researchers have been eavesdropping on unusually close-knit families of carrion crows (corvus corone corone) in Spain, collecting data on hundreds of thousands of different vocalisations. Small microphones recorded a variety of soft calls, far quieter than the familiar ‘caws’. The team then used AI to analyse and group the sounds. The researchers aim to better understand how the crows cooperate — and experiment with some human-crow chats.

Biggest-ever AI biology model writes DNA on demand

Scientists today released what they say is the biggest-ever artificial-intelligence (AI) model for biology. The model — which was trained on 128,000 genomes spanning the tree of life, from humans to single-celled bacteria and archaea — can write whole chromosomes and small genomes from scratch. It can also make sense of existing DNA, including hard-to-interpret ‘non-coding’ gene variants that are linked to disease.

‘Unconventional’ nickel superconductor excites physicists

Physicists have observed the key hallmarks of superconductivity in a thin film of crystals of nickel oxide, which they grew in the laboratory, at room pressure and a relatively high temperature of 45 kelvin (–228 °C). These crystals now join two groups of ceramics as ‘unconventional superconductors’ that can operate without being squeezed under pressure and at temperatures well above absolute zero. This new data point could be a step towards creating superconducting materials that work under ambient conditions, which would make technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging much cheaper and more efficient.

A human gene makes mice squeak differently — did it contribute to language?

The development of spoken language might have been influenced by a protein variant unique to humans. The NOVA1 protein, which is involved in brain development, differs between humans and animals by a single amino acid. To test the impact of such a small tweak, scientists used CRISPR gene-editing technology to replace the gene that expresses NOVA1 in mice with the version found in humans. The swap made the mice’s vocalisations more complex, which could suggest that the variant causes subtle brain changes that affect our ability to communicate.

Record-breaking neutrino is most energetic ever detected

Astrophysicists have observed the most energetic neutrino ever. The particle — which probably came from a distant galaxy — was spotted by the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) anchored to the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. KM3NeT picks up light emitted by high-energy, electrically charged particles such as muons — which can be produced when high-energy neutrinos smash into Earth’s atmosphere. In early 2023, it detected a muon that carried approximately 120 petaelectronvolts of energy. From the particle’s energy and its near-horizontal trajectory, researchers concluded that it was probably produced by a neutrino more than 20 times more energetic than any seen before.

Many birds-of-paradise species emit light through their plumage

Most species of birds-of-paradise are biofluorescent — parts of their body and their feathers can absorb UV or blue light and emit it back out at different frequencies — which makes their colours more vibrant. Of the 45 species, researchers found that 37 showed biofluorescence, with glowing body parts differing between males and females. Researchers theorise that the phenomenon would enhance courtship displays in males, whereas it seems more likely to be a camouflage aid in females.

Earth’s inner core is changing shape

By analysing how seismic waves from earthquakes travelled through the planet, scientists have found that Earth’s inner core is changing shape. They noted that the waveforms of some seismic signals changed between 2004 and 2008, and attributed the phenomenon to the inner core — normally thought to be solid and unyielding - bulging in some areas. Changes in the dynamics of the core could affect the Earth’s magnetic field and the length of our 24-hour day.

The origin of Indo-European languages

Ancient-genomics researchers have pinpointed the homelands of a nomadic tribe that transformed the culture and genetics of Europe and Asia, revealing a potential source for the Indo–European language family, spoken by nearly half of the world’s population. Genomes from more than 400 individuals suggest that the Yamnaya — Bronze Age herders from the grassy plains of present-day Russia and Ukraine — emerged along the northern shores of the Black Sea. “This Indo–European story has been a mystery for 200 years, and now step by step, we are coming closer to the solution,” says archaeologist Volker Heyd.

Why even physicists still don’t understand quantum theory 100 years on

Quantum physics works wonderfully, writes physicist and author Sean Carroll — but physicists don’t know why. “Or at least, if some of us think we know why, most others don’t agree.” On the centenary of quantum theory, Carroll delves into the counter-intuitive reality in which the act of observation influences what is observed — and few can agree on what that means.

Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed

Fragments collected from the asteroid Bennu contain the building blocks for life — all five nucleobases that form DNA and RNA and 14 of the 20 amino acids needed to make known proteins. But there’s a twist: on Earth, amino acids in living organisms tend to have a ‘left-handed’ structure. Those on Bennu, however, contain nearly equal amounts of these structures and their ‘right-handed’, mirror-image forms. This calls into question a hypothesis favoured by many scientists that asteroids similar to this one might have seeded life on Earth.

Strange flashes from ancient galaxy deepen mystery of fast radio bursts

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) — mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of energy — might be even weirder than we thought. Most FRBs are thought to come from magnetars, dead stars that usually form in young galaxies and host powerful magnetic fields. Now, astronomers have traced the origin of an FRB to the edge of an ancient galaxy in which stellar activity has slowed, which provides evidence that at least some FRBs must come from another source.

Where dinosaurs come from

Dinosaurs might have first evolved near the equator in Gondwana — a portion of the supercontinent Pangaea that today exists as northern South America and northern Africa. Researchers used computer modelling to analyze three proposed evolutionary trees, based on characteristics such as the ability to generate their own body heat. “These specialised traits didn't appear overnight,” says palæontologist Joel Heath, who co-authored the research. “However, we haven't yet found the transitional fossils that show how these changes happened.” The model accounts for gaps in the fossil record by factoring in the likelihood that plenty of fossils have yet to be discovered — especially in difficult-to-explore places.

China’s cheap, open AI model DeepSeek thrills scientists

A Chinese-built large language model called DeepSeek-R1 is stepping up as an affordable rival to ‘reasoning’ models such as OpenAI’s o1. R1 matched o1’s performance on certain tasks in chemistry, mathematics and coding, and has been released as ‘open-weight’, which means that researchers can study and build on the algorithm. “The openness of DeepSeek is quite remarkable,” says AI researcher Mario Krenn, since OpenAI’s models are “essentially black boxes”.

Paralysed man flies virtual drone using brain implant

Researchers have developed a device that let a 69-year-old man with paralysis fly a virtual drone using only his thoughts. The brain–computer interface (BCI) decoded the man’s brain activity as he imagined moving three groups of digits in real time. By associating neural signals with the movements of multiple fingers, the work builds on previous BCI research, most of which has focused on moving a single computer cursor or whole virtual hand.

Celtic communities in Britain were ‘matriolocal’

Celtic communities in Britain were ‘matriolocal’ — women stayed with their families and their husbands came to them — according to genetic analysis. Investigations of 55 individuals found in an Iron Age burial site in the south of England associated with the Durotriges tribe showed that two-thirds of them shared mitochondrial DNA. This form of DNA is passed only through mothers — a sign that they all descended from the same female ancestor. Matriolocality doesn’t necessarily equate to women’s empowerment, but the findings could explain why archaeologists often find Celtic women buried with goods such as jewellery and combs, while men weren’t afforded the same luxuries for the afterlife.

Meta AI creates speech-to-speech translator that works in dozens of languages

The tech giant Meta, which runs Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has unveiled a machine-learning system that can translate speech in 101 languages into words spoken by a voice synthesiser in any of 36 target languages. Trained on around half-a-million hours of audio matched with the corresponding text, the system translates speech to speech in only a few seconds without the need to translate it into text first. Meta researchers say they fine-tuned the system to limit the occurrence of gender bias and ‘added toxicity’, cases where a translation includes offensive terms that don’t reflect the original language.

How Pluto captured its largest moon: a new theory

Pluto might have hogged much of the spotlight historically, but the dwarf planet is actually part of a double act, alongside its biggest satellite, Charon. A new analysis suggests that Pluto used its gravity to entice Charon into this pas de deux, hugging the smaller body close before the two split into a whirling pair — a mechanism dubbed ‘kiss-and-capture’. Previously, scientists thought that the binary system formed as the result of a collision between two proto-bodies, with much of proto-Charon’s material sloshing over to proto-Pluto. The new idea suggests that Charon kept much of its core and mantle.

Physicists describe exotic ‘paraparticles’ that defy categorisation

Theoretical physicists have proposed a new type of particle. This ‘paraparticle’ doesn’t fit into the conventional classification system that labels all subatomic particles either fermions or bosons. The study comes after another group recently provided the first experimental demonstration of an ‘anyon’, another kind of particle that doesn’t fit the fermion or boson mould, in a one-dimensional virtual universe. The unusual behaviour of paraparticles and anyons could one day play a part making quantum computers less error-prone.

Who built Europe’s first cities?

Around 6,000 years ago, a group known as the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture built giant settlements of thousands of homes in what is now Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. These cities were notably egalitarian — all the houses were the same size, furnished similarly with beautifully crafted pottery, with no palaces, no grand temples and no signs of centralized administration. Then, after two millennia, the Cucuteni–Trypillia vanished. Scientists are starting to piece together the complex reasons why, from a cooling and drying climate to the rise of nomadic lifestyles brought by peoples from the eastern steppes — and perhaps a breakdown of the social equality that had served Cucuteni–Trypillia people for centuries.

Do insects have feelings?

The roll-call of creatures recognised by law as sentient — capable of feelings such as joy and fear — has expanded beyond the easily anthropomorphisable to animals such as octopuses and lobsters. So why not insects? Scientists have started to explore whether insects go beyond simple ‘reflex machines’ with experiments that aim to reveal something about their inner lives.

How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history

From deciphering burnt Roman scrolls to reading crumbling cuneiform tablets, neural networks could give researchers more data than they’ve had in centuries.

First sighting of ‘neutrino fog’ sparks excitement – but is it bad news for dark matter?

For the first time, physicists have observed glimmers of the ‘neutrino fog’, signals from particles called neutrinos that mimic those expected to be produced by dark matter — the mysterious substance thought to make up the bulk of matter in the Universe. That’s exciting for physicists because it means that detectors have become sensitive enough to pick up signals of dark matter. But there’s a catch: the neutrino signals could obscure the dark-matter signals that scientists are so eager to observe.

Neanderthals and sapiens interbred more recently than previously thought

All people, other than those whose ancestry comes solely from sub-Saharan Africa, have some Neanderthal DNA. Now two studies suggest that it entered our genomes virtually overnight, much more recently than was thought. One study finds that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred in a roughly 7,000-year period starting around 50,500 years ago; the other finds that the mixing took place between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago. The results and other insights come in part from the oldest human genomes ever sequenced: a male Homo sapiens found near Ranis, Germany, and a female Homo sapiens whose remains were discovered in a cave at a site called Zlatý kůň in the Czech Republic.

Galaxy could mirror a young Milky Way

Images of a young galaxy captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have given astronomers a glimpse of what the Milky Way might have looked like when it first formed. The images capture the galaxy, dubbed Firefly Sparkle after its resemblance to the bioluminescent insects, in the process of being assembled from groups of stars around 600 million years after the beginning of the universe.

Google’s new quantum chip achieves accuracy milestone

Google scientists have demonstrated that, with the right error-correction techniques, quantum computers can perform calculations with increasing accuracy as they are scaled up. The newest chip, Willow, has performed ‘below threshold’ quantum calculations — a key milestone in the quest to build quantum computers that are accurate enough to be useful.

Virtual lab powered by ‘AI scientists’ super-charges biomedical research

Researchers have created a virtual laboratory staffed by ‘AI scientists’ — large language models (LLMs) with defined scientific roles — that collaborate to achieve goals set by people. The team trained one LLM to be the work’s principal investigator (PI) and a second to act as a ‘scientific critic’. The ‘PI’ then trained three further LLMs to support the research efforts. Each worked independently, but the group came together for short ‘team meetings’ overseen by a human. When tasked with designing antibody fragments that can bind to the virus that causes COVID-19, the AI team proposed 92 structures in a fraction of the time it would have taken an all-human research group.

Oceans have never existed on Venus

Earth’s neighbour Venus has never had liquid water on its surface. One theory of the rocky planet’s history posited that after being covered by magma, the planet maintained a temperate climate for billions of years, which allowed oceans of water to form. Researchers used the chemical composition of volcanic gases in Venus’s atmosphere to infer the water content of its interior — a barometer of whether it ever had such oceans. They found only a 6% water content in the gases, suggesting a very dry planet that has never had liquid water on its surface.

How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

How close are we to developing an artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a machine capable of the whole range of cognitive tasks that human brains can handle? Some think that the large language models (LLMs) currently out there already have some of the ingredients in place. One point in these models’ favour is their underlying transformer architecture, which can find statistical patterns in a range of information beyond text, such as audio. Yet there are also signs that transformer-based LLMs have limits. For a start, the data used to train the models are running out.

Two ancient human relatives crossed paths 1.5 million years ago

Some 1.5 million years ago, two ancient hominin species crossed paths on a lake shore in Kenya. Their footprints in the mud were frozen in time and lay undiscovered until 2021. Now, analysis of the impressions reveals that they belonged to Homo erectus, a forebear of modern humans, and the more distant relative Paranthropus boisei. The two individuals walked through the lake area within hours or days of each other — leaving the first direct record of different archaic hominin species coexisting in the same place.

Bromalites show how dinosaurs rose to rule Earth

By analysing fossils of poo and vomit, researchers have reconstructed what dinosaurs ate and how this changed over time. The findings give a better understanding of how dinosaurs became so dominant, revealing that their rise, over millions of years, was influenced by factors including climate change-induced shifts in what vegetation was available, which the dinosaurs were able to adapt to better than other animals. The contents of the fossils became more varied over time, suggesting that larger dinosaurs with more diverse feeding habits began to gain prominence in the late Triassic period a little over 200 million years ago.

Evidence of oldest known alphabet unearthed among Syrian tomb treasures

Clay cylinders that are 4,400 years old, unearthed from a tomb in Syria, are inscribed with traces of the earliest known alphabetic writing system. The tomb, discovered in Umm el-Marra in 2004, contained four of these finger-sized cylinders, engraved with eight distinct symbols. Although the characters do not correspond to a known language, archaeologist Glenn Schwartz analysed the inscriptions and suggested that the symbols represent sounds that correspond to a, i, k, l, n, s and y. The inscriptions might record people’s names or label objects in the tomb, Schwartz says.

First rocks returned from Moon’s far side reveal ancient volcanic activity

Two groups of researchers have taken the first-ever look at samples brought back from the Moon’s far side — and revealed a history of volcanic activity that spans billions of years. Nearly two kilograms of lunar soil was retrieved by the China National Space Administration mission Chang’e-6 and then dropped down to Earth in a re-entry capsule. Scientists found grains of dust in the sample that originated from lava that erupted to the surface as long as 4.2 billion years ago.

Fossil sheds light on early bird brains

A remarkably well-preserved three-dimensional fossil has allowed researchers to digitally reconstruct the brain of an ancient bird species, the newly designated Navaornis hestiae. The starling-sized bird lived around 80 million years ago, a period from which 3D bird skulls have been difficult to find. The reconstruction gives researchers a glimpse of a stage of avian brain evolution between the earliest known birds and those alive today, partially filling in what was a knowledge gap of 70 million years.

First DNA from Pompeii body casts illuminates who victims were

Remains recovered from plaster casts of five people who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius have overturned some old assumptions about who they were. For example, a victim wearing an intricate golden bracelet had been described as a mother who died while holding their child. In fact, the adult was male and the two people were not related. Many of these narratives were designed to boost public interest in the site, notes archaeologist Steven Ellis. DNA evidence confirmed more scholarly interpretations, based on cultural artefacts, that Pompeii had a genetically diverse population descended from immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean.

Smashing atomic nuclei together reveals their elusive shapes

A new imaging method takes snapshots of atomic nuclei smashing together in high-energy collisions to help physicists better understand their shapes. Nuclei can take on a variety of forms, which can be tricky to predict: some are rigid and some fluctuate between several. The new method tracks the momentum of thousands of particles that result from collisions and matches the results with models to “roll back the clock to infer the shape of the nuclei”, says physicist Jiangyong Jia.

Cylinder symbols hint to origins of writing

Symbols engraved on cylinders that were used by traders to print motifs on clay tablets might have influenced the earliest-known form of writing. Researchers examined some of these cylinders from Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq, dating back to 4400 BC, around 1,000 years before the known invention of writing. They identified several symbols they think later developed into signs in ‘proto-cuneiform’, the precursor to the earliest version of written script. The findings support a theory first suggested in the 1990s by archaeologist Holly Pittman, but other experts caution that although some symbols on the cylinders might resemble those in proto-cuneiform, there is no obvious causal relationship linking them.