Monday, 22 September 2025

Venus has lava tubes, and they're weird

 

Image courtesy of JSC/NASA

Joel Kontinen

Could massive underground tunnels exist on Venus?  Yes, according to recent studies.

It has been suggested that lava tubes - underground tunnels carved out by molten rock - might be on Venus, and now we have direct evidence that this is the case.

We now know for sure that massive underground tunnels, carved by lava, exist on Venus – and they are surprisingly wide and different from those on any other planet.

It is uncontroversial that lava tubes – underground tunnels carved out by molten rock – exist on Earth, the moon and Mars. Smaller planets with low gravity tend to form more cavernous tubes, in part because the rock walls are less likely to collapse with weaker gravity. On the moon, for instance, the tubes are so large that scientists have proposed using them as live-in shelters for astronauts, providing shielding from the harsh solar wind.

 Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Venus has lava tubes, and they're weird | New Scientist 22 September 


Friday, 19 September 2025

30,000-year-old toolkit shows what ancient hunter carried in a pouch

 


Image courtesy of Martin Novák

What did ancient hunters carry in their pouch? Nothing extraordinary, but the date seemed to be all wrong.

A set of 29 stone tools, including blades and points for hunting, butchering and cutting wood, were found neatly arranged as if carried in a leather pouch that decayed

A set of stone tools found in the Czech Republic appears to be the personal toolkit of a hunter-gatherer who lived about 30,000 years ago. The 29 artefacts, which include blades and points meant for hunting, skinning, basic butchering and cutting wood, offer a rare glimpse into the daily lives of ancient hunters, says Dominik Chlachula at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.

In 2009, a village road collapsed in the Pavlovské vrchy mountains in the south-east of the country, opening up abandoned cellars that archaeologists began studying. In 2021, they found a deeper level of the site, called Milovice IV, containing charcoal dated to between 29,550 and 30,250 years ago. There, researchers found horse and reindeer bones, and – more recently – a bundle of stone tools, still positioned as if they had been wrapped in a leather pouch that had long since decayed.

 Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2025 30,000-year-old toolkit shows what ancient hunter carried in a pouch | New Scientist 16 September 


Wednesday, 17 September 2025

Mars once had an atmosphere that was thicker than Earth's today

 

Modern Mars barely has an atmosphere. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/USGS

Joel Kontinen

According to some evolutionists, Mars had an atmosphere that was thicker than Earth’s  atmosphere. In their view, some 4 million years after the origin of the solar system Mars was already almost complete.

Mars’s atmosphere may have once been hundreds of times thicker than it is today, acting as a blanket that protected it from frequent asteroids that ravaged other planets

At this time, the planets existed in a vast ball of hot gas and dust that swirled around the young sun, called the solar nebula, which some planets would have temporarily absorbed into their atmospheres. However, once the solar nebula receded, it was thought that the planets would quickly have lost this gas, reducing the densities of their atmospheres.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Mars once had an atmosphere that was thicker than Earth's today | New Scientist 15 September 


Tuesday, 16 September 2025

Early Neanderthals hunted ibex on steep mountain slopes

 

Ibex can move nimbly across steep mountain slopes. Image courtesy of Serge Goujon/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Ancient remains from a cave in Serbia show that Neanderthals were hunting mountain goats 300,000 years ago, adding to evidence of their ability to adapt to different environments

Did the early Neanderthals hunt Ibex sheep  many years ago? According to research, they did that,  but according to the Bible, they were descendants of Adam and Noah as secular scientists do not believe in Noah’s Flood. That also minimize the dates of the global flood.

Nearly 300,000 years ago, Neanderthals had already figured out how to hunt mountain goats along vertical cliffs and process them in well-organised camps.

Known for ambushing large animals in Western Europe’s flat meadows and forests, it seems Neanderthals adapted to the hills of Eastern Europe by adding nimble ibex to their hunting regime. The early humans skinned and butchered the animals in a nearby cave before roasting their bones for marrow and grease, showing impressive skill and knowledge far earlier than expected, says Stefan Milošević at the University of Belgrade in Serbia.

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2025 Early Neanderthals hunted ibex on steep mountain slopes | New Scientist 11 September 

  


Sunday, 14 September 2025

Incredibly exciting: NASA claims it's found the 'clearest sign' yet of past life on Mars

 


Image courtesy of NASA

 Joel Kontinen

NASA scientists have founds signs of past life on Mars. According to them, it was not a dead planet, as it is today.

Strange nodules of unusual minerals found on speckled rocks on Mars have offered more tantalizing clues that ancient life may have once thrived on the now-dead planet, NASA says.

According to NASA scientists, these features may result from non-biological processes occurring over millions of years. If evolution would be true, the evidence leads us to in a lake bed formation known as Bright Angel, it was crammed with organic compounds, had evidence that water once flowed through it.

 Source:

Ben Turner 2025 'Incredibly exciting': NASA claims it's found the 'clearest sign' yet of past life on Mars | Live Science September 10

Friday, 12 September 2025

Deflecting a deadly asteroid just got a lot less dangerous

 

Hitting an asteroid in the wrong place could accidentally make it more likely to impact Earth. Image courtesy of  buradaki/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Our first attempt at shifting the orbit of an asteroid has provided crucial insight into how we could safely deflect a space rock that was hurtling towards Earth.

Some space rocks can be nasty. According to evolution, the asteroids caused the demise of the dinosaurs. That event was probably related to Noah's flood that caused some dino's and many other animals to die.

If an the asteroid was heading for a deadly impact with Earth, could we nudge it off course safely without making the situation worse? Yes, thanks to a new system for calculating the perfect spot to smack a space craft into an incoming asteroid.

Steering away an asteroid bound for Earth is a high-stakes endeavour, and we have not had much practice. In 2023, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) showed for the first time that we can divert a space rock by smashing a small proband e into the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, and changing its orbit by 30 minutes.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Deflecting a deadly asteroid just got a lot less dangerous | New Scientist 11 September 

 


Thursday, 11 September 2025

Exoplanet 40 light years from Earth may have right conditions for life

 

Artist’s impression of the planet TRAPPIST-1e. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionists think that a Trappist star system could harbour life. TRAPPIST-1 is a small red dwarf star with at least seven planets.

 Found in 2016, it is situated 40 light years from us. It  lies within the Goldilocks zone where life is expected  to flourish. and it may have a  nitrogen-rich atmosphere like Earth’s.

TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf, it is much cooler than our own sun, making the readings more complex. For instance, chemicals like water that could indicate a hospitable atmosphere might actually be present in the star itself.  

But intelligent design might not be present on the exoplanet, that would make it not habitable for life.

Source:

Matthew Sparkes 2025 Exoplanet 40 light years from Earth may have right conditions for life | New Scientist 8 September 

Tuesday, 9 September 2025

Queen ant makes males of another species for daughters to mate with

 


Male ants of different species laid by the same mother: Messor ibericus (left) and Messor structor (right) Image courtesy of Jonathan Romiguier

Joel Kontinen

Can ants  with different species mix together?  According to Genesis, they are the same species, as species is a human invention.

Bizarrely, Iberian harvester ant queens lay eggs that turn into male builder harvester ants, and some of her offspring are hybrids of the two species.

Some of the eggs laid by Iberian harvester ant queens contain males of another species, the builder harvester ant – and these males father all of the workers in the colony.

“This statement sounds really, really crazy, like impossible,” says Jonathan Romiguier at the University of Montpellier in France. And yet, he discovered, it is true.

Romiguier became intrigued by Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) when he discovered that all the workers in M. ibericus nests were hybrids, with about half of their DNA matching that of the builder harvester ant (Messor structor).

 Source:

Tim Vernimmen 2025 Queen ant makes males of another species for daughters to mate with | New Scientist 3 September


Sunday, 7 September 2025

Early penguins may have used dagger-like beaks to skewer prey

 

Ancient relatives of penguins diversified quickly after the Cretaceous mass extinction event. Image courtesy of Mark P. Witton/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Some Darwinists think  that in the evolution of birds, the early ones used to skewer other birds, eating them.

Four new fossil species from New Zealand illustrate the striking diversity of the earliest penguins, which possessed long, dagger-like beaks they may have used to skewer prey.

The new discoveries “provide a stunning glimpse into the earliest evolution of penguins”, says Gerald MaThe fossils were unearthed from the Waipara Greensand formation in Canterbury, New Zealand, which contains rock dating back to between 62 and 58 million years old. The formation is well-known for holding some of the earliest bird species that flourished and diversified after the supposed mass extinction event that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs  according to the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany.

By Taylor Mitchell Brown 2025 Early penguins may have used dagger-like beaks to skewer prey | New Scientist 4 September


Saturday, 6 September 2025

Possible galaxy spotted by JWST could be the earliest we've ever seen

 

The possible galaxy in an image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, CEERS, G. Gandolfin the.ir view

Joel Kontinen

A possible galaxy named Capotauro may have formed within 90 million years of the big bang – but astronomers can’t be sure that’s what it is.

Would this be the first galaxy, evolutionists keep on asking. In their view, it appeared sometime after the big bang some 13.8 million years ago.

Astronomers might have discovered a galaxy that formed extremely early in the universe, nearly 200 million years before its closest competitor, but they caution there could be other explanations too.

Giovanni Gandolfi at the University of Padua in Italy and his colleagues probed data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look for distant objects that formed early in our universe’s 13.8-billion-year history.

The further away a galaxy is from Earth, the longer its light will have taken to reach us and the more it will be shifted to the red end of the spectrum by the expansion of space, a property known as redshift.

Source: 

Jonathan O’Callaghan 2025 Possible galaxy spotted by JWST could be the earliest we've ever seen | New Scientist 5 September

Thursday, 4 September 2025

Just 1 minute of vigorous exercise a day could add years to your life

 


Briefly walking up a steep hill counts as exercise. Image courtesy of Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Exercise could add years to your life.  This is the conclusion some scientists have just made.  

People who do several very short bouts of strenuous activity each day are much less likely to die in the next few years than those who do not exercise at all.

If you don’t exercise for the sake of exercising, doing five or six vigorous activities, each lasting just 10 seconds or so every day, can make a big difference. A study in the US has found that people who did a total of just over 1 minute of vigorous activity each day were much less likely to die of any cause in the following six years than those who did none.

Only around 15 per cent of adults exercise regularly, says Emmanuel Stamatakis at the University of Sydney in Australia. “The majority of tyears he adult population find it hard, or they’re not keen, or they’re not able to integrate regular exercise in their day-to-day routine.”

Source:

Michael Le Page 2025 Just 1 minute of vigorous exercise a day could add years to your life | New Scientist 1 September 

  

Wednesday, 3 September 2025

Newly discovered bus-size asteroid will zoom close past Earth today — and will not return for exactly 100 years

 

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL

Joel Kontinen

A bus-sized asteroid zoomed past Earth yesterday.

A bus-size asteroid, first spotted just over a week age, will zoom past Earth today (Sept. 3). The space rock will not get this close to us again until Sept. 4, 2125 — almost 100 years to the day.

The asteroid, dubbed 2025 QV5, was first spotted on Aug. 24. It is approximately 35 feet (11 meters) across, or around the same width as a school bus is long, and is hurtling toward us at more than 13,900 mph (22,400 km/h), according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Asteroid Watch.

The space rock will make a close approach to Earth on Wednesday, passing within 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) of our planet — or around twice as far away from us as the moon, according to JPL's Small-Body Database Lookup.

2025 QV5 has a roughly circular orbit around the sun, circling our home star every 359.4 days. During this time, it drifts between the orbits of Earth and Venus as it is subtly pulled from side to side between the two planets. As a result, it is unlikely to ever hit us. And even if it did, it is too small to be considered "potentially hazardous" and most of its material would likely burn up in the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, scientists are still keen to learn as much as they can about the space rock, and it has been listed as a target for NASA's Goldstone radar telescope in Barstow, California — which specializes in tracking and imaging near-Earth asteroids — over the coming days.

2025 QV5's orbit around the sun takes it close to Earth and Venus. For the majority of the next century, the asteroid will fly by the latter more often. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)

Source:

Harry Baker 2025 Newly discovered bus-size asteroid will zoom close past Earth today — and will not return for exactly 100 years | Live Science 2 October

 

  


Tuesday, 2 September 2025

Armoured dinosaur's 'crazy' spikes weren't just for defence

 

A life reconstruction of Spicomellus afer, an ankylosaur fossil discovered in Morocco. Image courtesy of Matthew Dempsey

Joel Kontinen

A 165-million-year-old ankylosaur from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco was covered in an array of extreme armour including body spikes fused to its skeleton, a feature never seen in any dinosaur before

When Adam and Eve sinned, the world turned around. The animals that could protect themselves  at times grew plates and spines so they would not be killed.

A dinosaur fossil found in Morocco may be the most bizarrely and elaborately armoured vertebrate that has ever walked the planet.

The first fossil of Spicomellus afer was discovered in Morocco and reported in 2021. It was only a rib fragment with fused spikes, suggesting that it belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs. These short-limbed, wide-bodied herbivorous dinosaurs are characterised by their covering of plates and spines.

Then, in October 2022, a farmer in the badlands of Morocco’s Middle Atlas mountains began to excavate a much more complete Spicomellus skeleton. That fossil has now been dated to 165 million years ago, in the Jurassic Period. The creature was probably about 4 metres long and weighed up to 2 tonnes.

Armoured dinosaurs such as stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, like modern crocodiles, had bony plates that sat in the skin called osteoderms. But in the Spicomellus fossil, there are two different types of bony armour: osteoderms and spikes that are actually fused to the bone.

“It’s unheard of among armoured dinosaurs, and indeed anything that has osteoderms, which is totally crazy,” says Susannah Maidment at the Natural History Museum in London, a member of the team that analysed the fossil.

In total, the Spicomellus specimen has dozens of armoured spikes covering almost its entire body. Some spikes attached to a neck collar are nearly a metre in length. There are also fused vertebrae in the tail, indicating that it may have been a fierce weapon.

The creature was so bizarre, says Maidment, that she “ran out of hyperboles to describe it”. “You can’t use words like ‘crazy’ in a scientific paper, and I kept using words like extreme and elaborate,” she says. “Then one of my colleagues suggested another way of trying to get across the unusualness of this thing was to describe it in the study as ‘baroque’.”

Such extreme armour would have severely limited the species’ capacity to navigate its environment and would have made living anywhere with dense vegetation almost impossible, says Maidment. “It would have just kept getting stuck everywhere,” she says.

The armour is so complex that the researchers think it had another function in addition to defence, such as to attract mates. “Things that appear to be totally impractical in the fossil record almost invariably relates to sex in some way or other. And so, you know, we think it is most likely to be some sort of display.”

By James Woodford 2025 Armoured dinosaur's 'crazy' spikes weren't just for defence | New Scientist 27 August