First portrait of Denisovans drawn from DNA

For the first time, scientists analysing the DNA of Denisovans have offered a glimpse of what they might have looked like.

Hubble telescope spies water raining on distant exoplanet

Astronomers have spotted hints of water raining in the atmosphere of a planet beyond the Solar System. The discovery is a rare glimpse of water molecules around a distant world that is not much bigger than Earth. Named K2-18 b, the planet is 34 parsecs (110 light-years) from Earth in the constellation Leo. Notably, it lies in the ‘habitable zone’ around its star — the distance at which liquid water could exist, making extraterrestrial life possible in its hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

Giant ‘bubbles’ detected around Milky Way’s black hole

The bubbles are gas structures that can be observed because electrons stirring inside them produce radio waves as they are accelerated by magnetic fields. This activity suggests that the bubbles are the remnants of an energetic eruption of hot gas several millions years ago.

Neanderthal children's footprints offer rare snapshot of Stone Age family life

A team of archæologists analysed 257 footprints discovered at Le Rozel on the coast of Normandy. They found the footprints belong to a group of between 10 and 14 individuals, most of whom were children including a two-year-old.

Geologists uncover history of lost continent buried beneath Europe

Geologists have reconstructed, time slice by time slice, a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged, not beneath an ocean somewhere, but largely below southern Europe. The only visible remnants of the continent—known as Greater Adria—are limestones and other rocks found in the mountain ranges of southern Europe. Scientists believe these rocks started out as marine sediments and were later scraped off the landmass’s surface and lifted up through the collision of tectonic plates. Yet the size, shape, and history of the original landmass—much of which lay beneath shallow tropical seas for millions of years—have been tough to reconstruct.

Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life

More than half a billion years ago, a strange, worm-like creature died as it crawled across the muddy sea floor. Both the organism and the trail it left lay undisturbed for so long that they fossilised. Now, they are helping to revise our understanding of when and how animals evolved.

The fossil, which formed some time between 551 million and 539 million years ago, in the Ediacaran period, joins a growing body of evidence that challenges the idea that animal life on Earth burst onto the scene in an event known as the Cambrian explosion, which began about 539 million years ago.