Oldest known evidence of Aboriginal settlement in arid Australia found in Flinders Ranges rock shelter

The chance discovery of a rock shelter in the Flinders Ranges has unearthed one of the most important prehistoric sites in Australia. The site, known as Warratyi, shows Aboriginal Australians settled the arid interior of the country around 49,000 years ago — some 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. The shelter, about 550 kilometres north of Adelaide, also contains the first reliably dated evidence of human interaction with megafauna. Artefacts excavated at the site also push back the earliest-known dates on the development of key bone and stone axe technologies and the use of ochre in Australia.

Fragments of fossilised dinosaur brain found for the first time

A brown bit of rock picked up in the UK by a professional fossil hunter a decade ago is the first piece of fossilised dinosaur brain tissue ever to be found. The roughly 133-million-year-old tissue comes from a species of dinosaur known as Iguanodon, and comes from a brain that is similar in structure, although larger, to that of modern-day crocodiles and birds.

Carbon nanotubes turn spinach plants into bomb detectors

A group of MIT engineers has converted ordinary spinach plants into biological bomb detectors.  The engineers implanted customised carbon nanotubes into the leaves of living plants to turn them into a real-time monitoring system for explosive molecules.