Strange dinosaur has scientists enthralled

About 110 million years ago along the shores of an ancient lagoon in what is now north-eastern Brazil, a two-legged, chicken-sized Cretaceous period dinosaur made a living hunting insects and perhaps small vertebrates like frogs and lizards. This dinosaur, called Ubirajara jubatus, possessed a mane of hair-like structures while also boasting two utterly unique, stiff, ribbon-like features probably made of keratin – the same substance that makes up hair and fingernails – protruding from its shoulders.

3300-year-old baboon skull may tell of mysterious ancient kingdom

Archæologists might have found the first hard evidence of a mysterious land called Punt where ancient Egyptians traded for precious metals and exotic animals. A mummified baboon (Papio hamadryas), taken from an ancient Egyptian temple and currently residing in the British Museum, seems to be the first known traveller from this antique land. The distinctive ratio of strontium isotopes in the baboon’s teeth show that it was born in an area that encompasses much of present-day Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, and portions of Somalia and Yemen — just where most archæologists think Punt was located.

First peek inside Mars reveals a crust with cake-like layers

NASA’s InSight mission has finally peered inside Mars, marking the first time scientists have directly probed the inside of a planet other than Earth. Seismologists are using marsquakes to map the red planet’s interior, measuring differences in how seismic waves move through its structure to determine the make-up of the planet’s geological layers. The new data show that Mars’s crust is made up of either two or three layers. In the coming months, scientists will report on measurements taken even deeper, ultimately revealing information about the planet’s core and mantle.

Photon-based quantum computer does a calculation that ordinary computers might never be able to do

A team in China claims to have made the first definitive demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ — exploiting quantum mechanics to perform computations that would be prohibitively slow on classical computers. The team achieved within a few minutes what would take half the age of Earth on the best existing supercomputers.

Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice

Researchers have restored vision in old mice and in mice with damaged retinal nerves by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age. The work suggests a new approach to reversing age-related decline: reprogramming some cells to a ‘younger’ state in which they are better able to repair or replace damaged tissue. Researchers took genes known to cause cells to revert to a stem-cell-like state and inserted them into mice using a virus. They then triggered the genes to see whether they would help injured eye cells or those degraded by age.

Study finds indications of life on Doggerland after devastating tsunamis

Around 8,200 years ago, a series of huge tsunamis, triggered by enormous underwater landslides off the coast of Norway, severed what is now Britain from continental Europe. But scraps of the inundated area — known as Doggerland — might have survived and later been settled, say archæologists. They analysed the topography of the land now beneath the North Sea and sedimentary cores that revealed evidence of the cataclysmic Storegga slides. The land that remained could have offered the first Neolithic farmers step-stones from the continent to Britain thousands of years later.

‘The Sistine Chapel of the ancients’

Archæologists have documented tens of thousands of ice-age paintings that stretch across nearly 13 kilometres of cliff face in Colombia. They depict patterns, figures, handprints and animals, including now-extinct species such as mastodons, palæolamas, giant sloths and ice-age horses. The discovery was made last year but is only now being revealed to coincide with the release of a television documentary that includes the art. The paintings are in the Serranía de la Lindosa, near the Chiribiquete national park, another site that is rich with prehistoric art.

Gigantic leap in solving protein structures

An artificial-intelligence (AI) network has made enormous progress in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. The breakthrough is likely to transform biology, say scientists, and should aid in drug design.