Mysterious ichthyosaur graveyard may have been a breeding ground

In a fossil graveyard in Nevada, palæontologists have found more than 100 individual Shonisaurus popularis ichthyosaurs — including both adults and embryonic or newborn individuals, but no juveniles. The finding supports the theory that the prehistoric marine reptile migrated to sheltered waters and gathered in groups to give birth, as some whales do today.

Hint of new physics vanishes under scrutiny

An intriguing anomaly in data gathered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that raised hopes of a new elementary particle has turned out to be a fluke. In 2014, LHC scientists at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, discovered that some massive particles decay more often into electron–positron pairs than into muon–antimuon pairs. This imbalance defied the standard model of physics, which predicts both pairs to occur with roughly the same frequency. The latest measurements and an investigation of confounding factors revealed that the discrepancy was partly the result of misidentifying other particles as electrons.

The mysterious song of the dinosaurs

Dinosaurs almost certainly didn’t roar. Researchers have yet to find any fossilised evidence of sound-producing organs like those of modern birds or mammals, so Tyrannosaurus rex probably resorted to closed-mouth vocalisation — low-frequency sounds that are made by inflating the throat. Computer simulations of a hadrosaur’s hollow head-crest showed that it could double as a resonating chamber.

First glimpse of 7-planet system with potentially habitable worlds

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has turned its incredible observing power onto one of the most exciting targets in space: the atmospheres of seven Earth-sized planets circling the star TRAPPIST-1. The planets lie in its ‘goldilocks’ zone, where temperatures are right for liquid water — and possibly life — to exist. The first results from two of the planets show that neither has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. That could mean that they have denser atmospheres that are made of molecules such as carbon dioxide or methane, or no atmosphere at all.

Giant wombat skull hints at distinct lifestyle

A fossilised skull found in a cave in Australia is the 80,000-year-old remains of a giant wombat (Ramsayia magna). A study of the most complete giant wombat skull ever found has revealed that the creature probably had a sizeable, fleshy nose and strong muscles for chewing tougher foods, and they did not live in burrows like modern wombats do. The sheep-sized animal probably weighed about 130 kilograms. Scientists still don’t know when or how the giant wombat went extinct.

Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’

Scientists at the world’s largest nuclear-fusion facility have for the first time achieved the phenomenon known as ignition — creating a nuclear reaction that generates more energy than it consumes. The breakthrough at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) has excited the global fusion-research community. The laboratory’s analysis suggests that the reaction released some 3.15 megajoules of energy — roughly 54% more than the energy that went into the reaction, and more than double the previous record of 1.3 megajoules. However, NIF’s 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy in the process.

Ankylosaurs competed for mates with club combat

Ankylosaurs might have used their enormous tail clubs to bash each other in battle over potential mates, rather than to ward off predators such as Tyrannosaurus rex. Researchers who analysed several Zuul crurivastator fossils (translation: ‘Zuul the shin-destroyer’) discovered that the spikes covering the animals’ bodies were often broken and half-healed around the hips. Since these scars were found only where another ankylosaurid club could have reached, the tail clubs were probably used for ritualistic combat, similar to how deer use their antlers.

Oldest-ever DNA shows mastodons roamed Greenland 2 million years ago

Two-million-year-old DNA sequences — the oldest ever obtained — recovered from frozen soil in the northeastern tip of Greenland suggest that the region was once home to mastodons and reindeer that roamed a forested ecosystem unlike any now found on Earth. Reindeers were also unheard of in Greenland — suggesting that DNA could reveal much about ecosystems that was not recorded in the fossil record.

Did physicists create a wormhole in a quantum computer?

Physicists have used a quantum computer to generate an entity known as an emergent wormhole. Quantum systems can be linked by entanglement, even when separated by extremely long distances. The authors generated a highly entangled quantum state between the two halves of a quantum computer, creating an alternative description, known as a holographic dual, in the form of an emergent wormhole stretched between two exterior regions. They then simulated a message traversing this wormhole. Such exotic physics is part of efforts to reconcile quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity.

Inside the Proton

Quanta offers a beautifully illustrated survey of the proton’s wonders, focusing on its paradoxical building blocks — quarks.

Pupating ants make milk for larvæ

During their pupal stage, between larva and adult, ants are immobile and were previously thought to be pretty much useless to the rest of the colony. Now researchers have discovered that they have a pivotal role, secreting a nutritious fluid that is drunk by adult ants and fed to larvæ. Analogous to mammalian milk, the secretion seems to be essential for young larvæ to grow strong and healthy. The pupæ also receive parental care: if the secretion is not removed, it can hurt them.

67-million-year-old fossil upends bird evolutionary tree

A 67-million-year-old beak bone has upended the evolutionary tree of life for birds. Most modern birds have flexible bony palates that allow them to move their upper beak independently of their skull. Just a few — including emus, ostriches and kiwis — have fused palates and fixed beaks. It had been assumed that the ancestors of all modern birds were like these ‘ancient-jawed’ palæognaths. But a tiny bone encased in rock suggests that flexible jaws came first.

Two new minerals discovered in meteorite

Researchers have identified two, possibly even three, new minerals in a huge iron-based meteorite that landed in Somalia. The minerals have been named elaliite, after the meteorite’s location near the town of El Ali, and elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, lead investigator of a NASA mission to a metal-rich asteroid. The 2-metre-wide meteorite has been well known to generations of people who live in the area, where it was named Nightfall.

Ancient skull uncovered in China could be million-year-old Homo erectus

A rare, well-preserved ancient human skull found in central China could be a million-year-old Homo erectus. As excavation of the fossil continues, archæologists and palæoanthropologists anticipate that the skull could give a fuller picture of the diverse family tree of archaic humans living throughout Eurasia in prehistoric times. It lies 35 metres from where two significant finds — dubbed the Yunxian Man skulls — were unearthed in 1989 and 1990 but, unlike them, it has not been crushed and distorted after millennia underground.

Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders

Wolves infected with a parasite that commonly infects cats are more likely to become leaders of the pack or strike out on their own. In a data set spanning 27 years, wolves in Yellowstone National Park that were infected with Toxoplasma gondii were 46 times more likely to become pack leaders and 11 times more likely to start a new pack than were uninfected animals.

Extreme numbers get new names

By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 10²⁴ bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. The data boom has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes to describe the outrageously big and small. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 10²⁷ and 10³⁰, and ronto and quecto signify 10⁻²⁷ and 10⁻³⁰. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram. Ronna and quetta might sound strange now, but so did giga and tera once, says metrologist Olivier Pellegrino. This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when zetta (10²¹), zepto (10⁻²¹), yotta (10²⁴) and yocto (10⁻²⁴) were added.

World votes to ditch leap seconds

Metrologists have agreed to stop adding ‘leap seconds’ to official clocks to keep them in sync with variations in Earth’s rotation. Leap seconds can disrupt systems based on precise timekeeping, because there’s no set way to integrate them (Google, for example, smears out the extra second in the 24 hours around midnight at coordinated universal time). To make matters worse, Earth’s rotation has sped up since 2020 — normally, over the long term, Earth’s rotation slows because of the pull of the Moon. So, for the first time, a leap second might need to be removed rather than added. The practice of adding leap seconds will be put on hold from 2035.

Bronze hand might rewrite history of Basque

A flat, life-size bronze hand engraved with symbols could prove the existence of written Vasconic — the language that developed into Basque.

Mathematician who solved prime-number riddle claims new breakthrough

Number theorist Yitang Zhang, who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers, now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to — but distinct from — the Riemann hypothesis, which is considered one of the most important problems in mathematics. Zhang posted his proposed solution — a 111-page preprint — on arXiv, and it has not yet been validated by his peers. If it checks out, it will help to tame the randomness of prime numbers, but Zhang and other scientists have previously proposed solutions to this problem that turned out to be faulty. It will take a while for researchers to comb through Zhang’s argument to see whether it is correct.

First known Neanderthal family discovered in Siberian cave

For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father, his teenage daughter and two other more distant relatives. The discovery of the family and seven more individuals in Chagyrskaya Cave in southern Siberia, along with two more from a nearby site, nearly doubles the number of known Neanderthal genomes. Genetic clues found in the individuals’ DNA hint that the population of breeding adults was low, and that there was more diversity in maternally inherited mitochondrial genomes — suggesting that mothers left their communities to build new families.

Oldest known star map found hidden in sacred text

A mediæval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath a religious text, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — thought to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky. Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. The extract illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.

Optical clocks could redefine the second

Physicists have devised a way to synchronise the ticking of two clocks through the air with extreme precision, across a record distance of 113 kilometres, using precise pulses of laser light. The feat is a step towards redefining the second using optical clocks — timekeepers that are 100 times more precise than atomic clocks. Hyper-precise clocks could have a role in testing the general theory of relativity and revealing subtle changes in gravitational fields.

Neurones in a dish learn to play computer game

Hundreds of thousands of human neurones growing in a dish coated with electrodes have been taught to play a version of the classic computer game Pong. In doing so, the cells join a growing pantheon of Pong players, including pigs taught to manipulate joysticks with their snout and monkeys wired to control the game with their minds. The gamer cells respond to electrical signals from the electrodes, which both stimulate the cells and record changes in neuronal activity. Researchers then converted the stimulation signals and the cellular responses into a visual depiction of the game.

Asteroid diverted for the first time

NASA has announced that the spacecraft it slammed into an asteroid on 26 September succeeded in altering the space rock’s movement by even more than expected. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft nudged the asteroid Dimorphos closer to its partner, Didymos, and cut its orbit time around that rock by 32 minutes.

Underground microbes may have swarmed ancient Mars

Ancient Mars might have been capable of nurturing hydrogen-eating, methane-producing microbes. Although similar creatures helped to make the environment on Earth more conducive to life, they would have done the opposite on Mars. Computer models show that methane produced by Martian microbial life would have cooled the planet and made it uninhabitable.

Evidence of dinosaur-killing asteroid impact found on the moon

Researchers studying tiny glass beads in lunar soil samples brought back by China’s Chang’e-5 mission have reconstructed a timeline of asteroid strikes on the Moon — and found that they mirrored impacts on Earth. The finding suggests that asteroid strikes on our planet, including the one that killed the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, were accompanied by a series of smaller collisions both here and on the Moon. This should make the history of Earth’s bombardment in some ways easier to study: the glass beads, formed by the heat and pressure generated during an asteroid strike, are common on the Moon but harder to find on Earth.

Last images from DART as it crashed into an asteroid

NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose on Monday, and we all got a ringside seat. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) probe rammed into the harmless asteroid Dimorphos to test whether humanity could reroute a dangerous asteroid heading for Earth. DART took pictures every second as it approached the space rock. Telescopes on Earth watched the collision. And a tiny satellite flew alongside and photographed the impact, which took place 11 million kilometres from Earth. Studying its shots of the plume of debris that was ejected from Dimorphos will help scientists to understand exactly how the impact unfolded.

China’s Mars rover finds hints of catastrophic floods

China’s Zhurong rover has peered under the surface of Mars — down to 100 metres — and has found evidence of two huge floods that shaped the landscape. Since May last year, Zhurong has been exploring Utopia Planitia, in Mars’s northern hemisphere. Images from the rover’s ground-penetrating radar found layered patterns under the surface, which the authors suggest are made of sedimentary rocks carried in by two major floods around 3 billion and 1.6 billion years ago. But other scientists say that, although radar is good at detecting layers of subsurface material, it’s less proficient at identifying what layers are made of.

NASA’s Mars rover makes ‘fantastic’ find in search for past life

Since July, NASA’s Perseverance rover has drilled and collected four slim cores of sedimentary rock, formed in what was once a river delta on Mars. They are the first of this type of rock to be gathered on another world — and scientists are excited because at least two of the cores probably contain organic compounds, which, on Earth, are often associated with living things. If all goes well, the samples will be the first ever returned from Mars. They will be picked up by another spacecraft and brought back to Earth no earlier than 2033.

‘Lunar wobble’ influences mangrove growth

Long-term fluctuations in the Moon’s orbit — known as the lunar wobble — could influence mangrove canopy growth. Researchers in Australia used high-resolution satellite images to measure mangrove canopy across the continent between 1987 and 2020. They found that the wobble, which pulls low tides lower and high tides higher in a cyclic pattern that lasts about 18 years, was a major factor in the expansion and contraction of mangrove growth. Depending on the phase of wobble, mangrove ecosystems get less water — resulting in thinner canopy cover — or higher tides that increase growth. Mangroves are natural carbon sinks, so the findings could help to better assess how much carbon they will store over time.

Genes May Explain HowThis Jellyfish Can Live Forever

The tiny translucent jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can revert to an immature polyp state and revive itself again and again — effectively making it immortal. Researchers have now sequenced the jellyfish’s genome and studied the genes involved in its rejuvenation. They found that genes associated with DNA storage were highly expressed in adult jellyfish, but reduced as the animals transformed into polyps. However, genes linked to pluripotency, or the ability of cells to turn into any cell type, were increasingly expressed as the jellyfish reverted.

Milky Way spirals boost Earth crust formation

Earth’s crust builds up faster when the Solar System surfs through one of four spiral arms of the Milky Way. Researchers measured the decay of uranium in the ancient continental crust in Greenland and Australia to study how it formed between 2.8 and 3.8 billion years ago. They found that, every 200 million years or so — in tune with Earth passing through the Milky Way — the rate of crustal production increased. One explanation could be that denser areas of the galaxy dislodge more comets from the Oort cloud, which rain down on Earth, melting the crust and causing more magma to bubble up and congeal.

Did this gene give modern human brains their edge?

Researchers have pinpointed a fateful genetic mutation that might have contributed to a cognitive advantage for modern humans over Neanderthals. Tests in the laboratory suggest that a single change in the gene TKTL1 ultimately causes the brain to develop more neurons. The Neanderthal version of TKTL1 still exists in some modern humans, although it’s very rare and it’s unknown whether it causes any disease or cognitive differences.

Blogger Comments:

Neanderthals had the larger brains, and all 'out of Africa' humans have Neanderthal ancestry. 

Webb telescope spots CO2 on exoplanet for first time

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first unambiguous evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System. The telescope gleaned information about the composition of the gas giant WASP-39b as it moved across the face of its star. Starlight shone through the planet’s atmosphere, where various molecules absorbed specific wavelengths of infrared light, creating the telltale absorption spectrum in the image above. The result has bolstered confidence that Webb is going to be revolutionary for exoplanet research.

‘Levitating’ nanoparticles could push the limits of quantum entanglement

Physicists have suspended tiny glass spheres in a vacuum and made them interact with one another at close distance. The ‘levitating’ nanoparticles can be manipulated with exquisite precision, offering the tantalising prospect of probing quantum physics at a macroscopic scale. For example, if the particles can be slowed to their quantum ground state (as cold as they can get), it could become possible to put them into a state of quantum entanglement, meaning that some of their measurable properties — in this case, their positions — are more strongly correlated than would be allowed by the laws of classical, non-quantum physics.

Seven-million-year-old femur suggests Sahelanthropus tchadensis walked upright

An ancient human relative, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, might have walked on two legs seven million years ago. S. tchadensis could be the earliest known member of the hominin lineage, the evolutionary branch that includes the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees and ends with modern humans. The theory is based on a battered fossil leg bone that was discovered in Chad more than 20 years ago. But some scientists are not convinced that the femur’s traits prove the creature stood tall.

Webb sees most distant star ever observed

The James Webb Space Telescope has imaged the most distant star ever discovered, which is 8.5 million parsecs away. The star was first identified by the Hubble Space Telescope earlier this year. WHL0137-LS — or ‘Earendel’, meaning ‘morning star’ in old English — is thought to have formed just 900 million years after the Big Bang. It is visible thanks to gravitational lensing: the massive Sunrise Arc galaxy cluster in its foreground warps spacetime so much that the star is magnified thousands of times.

Huge megalithic complex of more than 500 standing stones discovered in Spain

A huge complex of more than 500 standing stones has been discovered in southern Spain during an archæological survey of a plot of land earmarked for an avocado plantation. The oldest of the megaliths — which include stone circles, mounds and tombs — were probably placed during the sixth or fifth millennium BC.

Megalodon shark was longer than a bus

A 3D model of a colossal shark that roamed the oceans millions of years ago suggests that the beast was 16 metres long and could have eaten a whale in just a few bites. Few megalodon fossils exist, but researchers were able to create the digital model using a rare collection of vertebrae and teeth, as well as scans of modern great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). They calculated that the ancient creature weighed around 70 tons — as much as ten elephants— and that its open jaw stretched to 2 metres wide.

Notorious dark-matter signal could be due to analysis error

Physicists have shown that an underground experiment in South Korea can ‘see’ dark matter streaming through Earth — or not, depending on how its data are sliced. The results cast further doubt on a decades-old claim that another experiment has been detecting the mysterious substance.

AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein

Determining the 3D shape of almost any protein known to science will soon be as simple as typing in an internet search. Researchers have used the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network AlphaFold to predict the structures of some 200 million proteins from one million species, covering nearly every known protein on the planet. The data will be uploaded to a free database.

Molecular motor is ‘DNA origami’ milestone

Physicists have built a molecular-scale motor entirely from DNA strands, and used it to store energy by winding up a DNA ‘spring’. The tiny machine gains energy from Brownian motion — the constant random argy-bargy of molecules in a medium. The machine turns like the ratchet wheel in a clock, winding a string of DNA like a spiral spring.

Ear fossils hint at origin of warm-blooded mammals

Fossilised inner-ear canals suggest that the moment mammals evolved to be warm-blooded — the timing of which is highly contested — occurred around 230 million to 200 million years ago. A team of researchers hypothesised that hotter, more active bodies would have less viscous fluid in their vestibular system, which maintains balance and spatial orientation — and the inner ear’s shape would adapt in turn. After calibrating their understanding on the basis of 50 living vertebrate species, they analysed the inner ear canals of 56 extinct synapsid species — the reptile-like ancestors of mammals — and found that the shape of the canals had changed abruptly in the Late Triassic period.

Mass and Angular Momentum, Left Ambiguous by Einstein, Get Defined

In 1979, Nobel-prizewinning physicist Roger Penrose said that the two biggest unsolved problems in general relativity concerned mass and angular momentum (a measure of rotational motion). Both those properties, which are easy enough to understand in day-to-day life, spiral out of mathematical control when an object interacts with the curvy-wurvy effects of space-time within a finite region. Now both problems have been solved, thanks to a culmination of decades of work.

Hoatzin could reshape avian taxonomy

Hoatzins (Opisthocomus hoazin) present an evolutionary enigma — one analysis of their DNA suggests that the birds’ closest relatives are cranes and shorebirds, and another found that they are closely related to a group that includes tiny, hovering birds, such as hummingbirds. The riddle is forcing biologists to consider whether to rethink the shape of the standard ‘tree of life’ for modern birds.

Root-cropping behaviour in gophers may represent a kind of husbandry

Gophers graze on roots that grow into their large network of tunnels, which some researchers say could be the first evidence of a non-human mammal engaging in farming. Scientists installed cameras in trenches that they dug around tunnels used by southeastern pocket gophers (Geomys pinetis) in Florida. The roots of above-ground grasses and nettles quickly filled the tunnels that the gophers couldn’t access, but remained short in those they could. The animals nibbled on the roots to nourish themselves and stimulate root regrowth, and dropped waste throughout the network to fertilise the soil — effectively cultivating the crop. Other researchers say the practice can’t be described as farming because the gophers don’t plant or distribute their crops as do humans and other creatures, such as fungus-growing ants.

Five things we don’t know about the Higgs boson

1. So far, scientists have determined that the boson’s properties — such as its interaction strength — match those predicted by the standard model, but with an uncertainty of around 10%. This is not good enough to show the subtle differences predicted by new physics theories.
2. Physicists have seen the Higgs boson decay into only the heaviest matter particles, such as the bottom quark. They now want to check whether it interacts in the same way with particles from lighter families, known as generations.
3. The Higgs boson has mass, so it should interact with itself, and the rate of this self-interaction is crucial to understanding the Universe. But such events — for example, the decay of an energetic Higgs boson to two less-energetic ones — are extremely rare and haven’t been conclusively observed yet.
4. Physicists want to know the lifetime of the Higgs — how long, on average, it sticks around before decaying to other particles — because any deviation from predictions could point to interactions with unknown particles, such as those that make up dark matter.
5. Some theories that extend the standard model predict that the Higgs boson is made up of other particles, or that there are different types of Higgs boson. Future observations could provide evidence if any of these exotic predictions are true.

Muon magnetism update

Last year, an experiment suggested that the muon — a subatomic particle similar to an electron — had inexplicably strong magnetism, possibly breaking a decades-long streak of victories for the leading theory of particle physics, known as the standard model. Now, revised calculations by several groups suggest that the theory’s prediction of muon magnetism might not be too far from the experimental prediction after all. By narrowing the gap, the latest predictions might make it easier to resolve the discrepancy between theory and experiment.

Ice Age wolf genomes point to dog origins

Modern dogs probably evolved in eastern Eurasia — and might have been domesticated more than once. Researchers analysed 72 ancient wolf (Canis lupus) genomes spanning the last 100,000 years. They found that early dogs from northeastern Europe, Siberia and North America are closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Asia. However, some dogs from western Europe and Africa seem to have a genetic link to ancient wolves that lived farther west.

Mastodon tusk reveals life of roaming

Chemical signatures inscribed in an ancient tusk tell a mastodon’s life story — from his adolescent years to his premature death around 13,200 years ago. Researchers matched the chemical signatures in the tusks of an American mastodon (Mammut americanum) with those from his home range in what is now Indiana. They found that, as an adult, he travelled to mastodon mating grounds every year in the spring and summer. It was there, at 34 years of age, that he met his end, probably from a skull puncture during a battle with another bull.