Science
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A crisis in cosmology may mean hidden dimensions really exist
DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Last year, cosmologists working on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) reported hints that the mysterious dark energy thought to be driving the expansion of the universe may be weakening over time. If these startling findings prove correct, then dark energy cannot be a cosmological constant – a fixed term in our equations that represents the…
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Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing
The Adorant figurine, approximately 38,000 years old, consists of a small, ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0 Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, according to…
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The mystery of nuclear ‘magic numbers’ has finally been resolved
Some atoms seem to be particularly stable because of their numbers of protons and neutrons Shutterstock/ktsdesign A special set of numbers has formed the backbone of nuclear physics research for decades, and now we finally know how it arises from the quantum mix of nuclear particles and forces. Nearly 80 years ago, physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer showed that when the…
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Is this carved rock an ancient Roman board game?
The possible game board with pencil marks highlighting the incised lines Het Romeins Museum A mysterious flat stone with a geometric pattern of straight lines carved into it may be a previously unknown Roman board game. Thousands of simulations by artificial intelligence of how sliding stone or glass pieces could have marked the surface suggest it was an early example…
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Ants attack their nest-mates because pollution changes their smell
Harvester ants attack nest-mates whose scent they don’t recognise JorgeOrtiz_1976/Shutterstock Common air pollutants like ozone and nitric oxide can change the way ants smell, prompting their nest-mates to attack them as if they were intruders. Ants recognise their comrades by scent, and when they encounter an ant whose smell they don’t recognise, they respond aggressively, biting and sometimes killing the…
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Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden tool
Artist’s reconstruction of a Palaeolithic woman making a digging stick from an alder tree trunk G. Prieto; K. Harvati The oldest known wooden tools have been found in an opencast mine in Greece. They are 430,000 years old and were made by an unidentified species of ancient human – perhaps the ancestors of Neanderthals. Prehistoric wooden artefacts are “very scarce”,…
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Why a tool-using cow could change how we see farm animals
Veronika the cow is the first recorded non-primate mammal to demonstrate flexible, multi-purpose tool use Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró A few years ago, during a taxi ride, the driver described to me how a pig had transformed his life. A childhood with dogs taught him what to expect from animals, yet he was unprepared for the pig he had taken…
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Pompeii’s public baths were unhygienic until the Romans took over
The Stabian Baths, one of the bathhouses first built by the Samnites in Pompeii Icas94/De Agostini via Getty Images A trip to Pompeii’s public baths meant taking a dip in water contaminated with sweat and urine – until the Romans took over and sanitation improved. It’s easy to think of ancient Pompeii as a typical Roman city, particularly given that…
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Northern Greenland ice dome melted before and could melt again
Researchers working at Prudhoe Dome in Greenland Caleb K. Walcott-George An ice dome in northern Greenland once melted completely at temperatures the region could experience again this century, a finding that will begin to paint a more accurate picture of how fast the melting Greenland ice sheet could raise global sea levels. Researchers drilled 500 metres down through the centre…
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Mathematicians unified key laws of physics in 2025
The equations that govern fluids can be tricky to handle Vladimir Veljanovski / Alamy In 1900, mathematician David Hilbert presented his colleagues with a list of problems he believed both captured the present state of mathematics and the shape of its future. This year, 125 years later, Zaher Hani at the University of Michigan and his colleagues solved one of…
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