This bottleneck event happened between 130,000 and 50,000 years ago, according to new research led by scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Universidad de Alcalá. Neanderthal. Image credit: Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. “Neanderthals are the best-documented pre-modern humans in the fossil record in terms of morphology, genetics, behavior, and…
This supernova event likely occurred in the Upper Centaurus Lupus association, a group of massive stars approximately 457 light-years away from Earth. Illustration of an Earth-like exoplanet after X-ray radiation exposure. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss. Life on Earth is constantly evolving under continuous exposure to ionizing radiation from both terrestrial and…
Palm trees of the tribe Trachycarpeae once thrived in what is now subarctic Canada, according to an analysis of fossilized phytoliths — microscopic siliceous structures produced in specific tissues by many plant families — from Canada’s Northwest Territories. Palm phytoliths from the Eocene Giraffe locality (a-q) and modern phytoliths extracted from foliage of the coryphoid…
Astronomers using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on NSF’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of the NOIRLab, have compiled the largest sample ever of dwarf galaxies that host an actively feeding black hole, as well as the most extensive collection of intermediate-mass black hole candidates to date….
Paleontologists have unearthed five new theropod fossils from the Cretaceous period, including two carcharodontosaurian specimens, in Victoria, Australia. The landscape of Cretaceous Australia. Image credit: Jonathan Metzger / Museums Victoria. The two carcharodontosaurian specimens provide the first evidence for this dinosaur group in Australia. They came from the Strzelecki Group (121.4-118 million years old) and…
Physicists from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Hamburg have observed how electrons, excited by ultrafast light pulses, danced in unison around a subnanometer C60 fullerene (buckminsterfullerene) molecule. Biswas et al. observed how electrons, excited by ultrafast light pulses, danced in unison around a buckminsterfullerene molecule, then emitted excess energy in the form…
The accretion disk orbiting Sagittarius A* is emitting a constant stream of flares with no periods of rest, according to an analysis of new data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope; while some flares are faint flickers, lasting mere seconds, other flares are blindingly bright eruptions, which spew daily; there also are even fainter…
Tropical riparian ecosystems — those found along rivers and wetlands — in what is now North China recovered within as little as 2 million years after the end-Permian extinction, one of the most devastating bio-crises in the history of life, destroying both marine and terrestrial ecosystems. An illustration depicting the onset of the end-Permian mass…
Legionella is an atypical cause of community-acquired pneumonia that often presents with a prodrome of fever, malaise, fatigue, and occasionally diarrhea before respiratory symptoms. This electron micrograph depicts an amoeba, Hartmannella vermiformis (orange), as it entraps a Legionella pneumophila bacterium (green) with an extended pseudopod. Image credit: Barry S. Fields / CDC. Legionella are aerobic…
In 1983, the theoretical physicist Brandon Carter concluded that the time it took for humans to evolve on Earth — relative to the total lifespan of the Sun — suggests that our evolutionary origin was intrinsically unlikely and that comparable human-like observers beyond Earth are exceedingly rare. In new research, scientists from Penn State, the…
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