Life’s ‘last universal common ancestor’ may predate life itself

Researchers have gathered more evidence for the idea that the first spark that spawned us all — the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) — was a part-organic, part-rock chemical system that formed in the energetically and chemically rich environment of hydrothermal vents. New findings also suggest that the two oldest single-celled domains of life, bacteria and archaea, sprang independently from this first source.

Did Neanderthals roam as far as Arabia?

An analysis of stone tools thought to have been crafted by Neanderthals suggests that the ancient humans might have roamed as far south as the Arabian Peninsula around 55,000 years ago. The artefacts come from a site beside an ancient lake in what is now Saudi Arabia’s Nefud Desert. The characteristics of the tools, and efforts to date the sand of the site, suggest that Neanderthals might have lived there just as the area was shifting from desert to a wetter environment — which could have drawn animals, and the humans who hunted them, further south.

Dolphins learn to shell from their mothers

Researchers have recorded what appears to be an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) mother giving its calf a lesson in a hunting technique called shelling. The seldom-observed behaviour involves the dolphin catching a fish in an empty sea snail shell, lifting the shell out of the water and shaking it to drop the fish into its mouth. The team spotted an adult female surfacing with a shell containing a fish, and a calf lifting the same shell a few minutes later, which suggests that it was learning from watching its mother, they say.

How an ancient collision with another galaxy transformed the Milky Way

Astrophysicists have found evidence that the Milky Way collided and merged with a dwarf galaxy around 12 billion years ago. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the team found that the makeup of some globular clusters — groups of stars held tightly together by gravity — doesn’t match that of those that are thought to be native to the Milky Way or that arrived during a later merger with another dwarf galaxy known as the Gaia–Sausage–Enceladus. “We do not know how our house was built,” says astrophysicist and study co-author Davide Massari. But these findings point to “where the first significant batch of bricks came from”.

Physicists home in on mysterious ‘glueballs’

A team of physicists says it has observed strong evidence of a mysterious ‘glueball’, a particle made up of force-carrying gluons. The team says that a particle known as X(2370) is mostly made up of these glueballs — clusters of the gluons that bind quarks to form protons and neutrons and hold them inside the nucleus of an atom. There is no single smoking gun that proves that this particle is made of glueballs, says particle physicist Bruce Yabsley. But the findings are “quite persuasive”, he says. The group presented their results at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Natal, Brazil, last week.