Oldest fast radio burst ever seen sheds light on early star formation

 

Image courtesy of Science Photo Library/Alamys

Joel Kontinen

Radio bursts are a phenomenon that surprise us. We don’t know the cause.

A bright flash of radio waves from 3 billion years after the big bang is illuminating parts of the universe that astronomers can’t normally see. Magnetars, which are a kind of neutron star, may be the source of fast radio bursts.

A strange flash of light from near the beginning of the universe could help astronomers map difficult-to-see gas in between galaxies, like a flashbulb in a dark room.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely short but powerful blasts of radio-frequency light that have puzzled astronomers since they were first spotted in 2007. A leading theory is that they are produced by extremely magnetic neutron stars, called magnetars. But because we only know of a few thousand examples in the whole universe, with most coming from galaxies that are relatively close to the Milky Way, there is much we still don’t understand about them.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Oldest fast radio burst ever seen sheds light on early star formation | New Scientist 15 August 

 

300,000-year-old teeth from China may be evidence that humans and Homo erectus interbred, according to new study

 

Image courtesy of X. Wu et al. / Journal of Human Evolution

Joel Kontinen

Early humans came from Adam and Eve. They were the early members of the human race and no interbreeding of humans and Homo erectus took place. They were all members of the human race.

“A small collection of 21 teeth may have big implications for the evolution of humans in Asia. The dentition, which comes from a mystery human ancestor that lived at least 300,000 years ago in China, shows an unusual combination of features that may suggest early humans interbred with Homo erectus, a new study reveals.

"It's a mosaic of … traits never seen before — almost as if the evolutionary clock were ticking at different speeds in different parts of the body," study co-author María Martinón-Torres, a paleoanthropologist at the Spanish National Research Center for Human Evolution (CENIEH), said in a statement.

In a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, researchers studied a handful of teeth from the Hualongdong archaeological site in South China and found that they had a mixture of ancient and modern traits.”

Source:

Kristina Killgrove 2025 300,000-year-old teeth from China may be evidence that humans and Homo erectus interbred, according to new study | Live Science August 5

NASA finds multi-billion-year-old 'coral' on Mars

 

Image courtesy of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Joel Kontinen

NASA says it has found a multi-billion year old coral on Mars, but life on created on earth, not on Mars.

“NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back intriguing images of what looks like a piece of coral on Mars.

The strange object is in fact a small, light-colored, wind-eroded rock, which the rover found inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater on July 24 — but it looks remarkably similar to the reef-building creatures found in Earth's oceans.

A black and white picture taken with Curiosity's Remote Micro Imager — a high-resolution, telescopic camera that is mounted on the rover — and shared by NASA in a statement on Aug. 4 shows the approximately 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) rock with its intricate branches.

"Curiosity has found many rocks like this one, which were formed by ancient water combined with billions of years of sandblasting by the wind," NASA representatives wrote in the statement.

Coral-shaped rocks on Mars started forming billions of years ago, when the Red Planet still had water, according to the statement. Just like water on Earth, this water was full of dissolved minerals. It percolated through small cracks in Martian rocks, gradually depositing minerals and forming solid "veins" inside the rocks.

These veins form the strange branches of the coral-shaped object that we see in Curiosity's picture today, after millions of years of erosion by sand-laden winds wore away the rock.

Other examples of unusual rocks found on Mars include "Paposo" — a strangely-shaped rock measuring about 2 inches (5 cm) across that Curiosity also discovered on July 24 — and a tiny, flower-shaped object, which the rover photographed in Gale Crater in 2022.

Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, touching down in the Gale Crater — a meteor impact crater on the boundary between the Red Planet's cratered southern highlands and its smooth northern plains. The rover's mission, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is to scan the Martian surface for any signs that it was habitable at any point in the distant past.

So far, Curiosity has traversed roughly 22 miles (35 kilometers) of the 96-mile-wide (154 km) crater. Its path is meandering and slow, because it has to stop to drill into rocks, collect samples and gather data.

The rover's explorations have uncovered abundant evidence that the potential for life once existed on Mars, including long carbon chains from 3.7 billion-year-old rocks and signs that Mars once had a carbon cycle.”

The dates in this story are false.

Source:

Sascha Pare 2025 NASA finds multi-billion-year-old 'coral' on Mars | Live Science 7 August

 

Ancient tools on Sulawesi may be clue to origins of 'hobbit' hominins

 

Imaage courtesy of Budianto Hakim et al.

Joel 

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi was a likely stepping stone for ancient hominins to reach nearby Flores, the home of the mysterious Homo floresiensis

Who were the hobbits, the small humans found in Indonesia? Their remains are found on the island of Flores, and some say that they were suffering from a condition called microcephaly, a neurological disorder that still causes some individuals to have an abnormally small head.

”Seven stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are the earliest evidence ever discovered of ancient humans making a sea crossing, dating back up to 1.4 million years.

They may provide clues to how a tiny human species, nicknamed “hobbits”, ended up on the nearby island of Flores.

The first of the artefacts was found embedded in a sandstone outcrop at a site called Calio by Budianto Hakim at the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia in 2019, and a full excavation uncovered six more tools in the same outcrop.”

Source: 

James Woodford 2025 Ancient tools on Sulawesi may be clue to origins of 'hobbit' hominins | New Scientist 6 August

 

 

 

Giant meat-eating dinosaur skulls reveal ‘bone-crushing’ bite

 

Illustration of Tyrannosaurus rex 

Image courtesy of Roger Harris/Getty Images/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Differences in the skulls of carnivorous dinosaurs suggest some dinosaurs ripped flesh while others crushed bones.

A closer look at the skulls of gigantic dinosaurs reveals some preferred to shred their prey, while others attacked with bone-crushing.

Andre Rowe and Emily Rayfield at the University of Bristol in the UK looked at the skulls of 18 species of theropods from across the Mesozoic Era. This diverse group of dinosaurs, which includes T. Rex, Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus, walked on their hind legs and had large heads and big, sharp teeth.

Source: 

Meagan Mulcair Giant meat-eating dinosaur skulls reveal ‘bone-crushing’ bite | New Scientist 4 August 

 

What would it feel like to be on a planet spinning out of control?

“The faster the planet, the fiercer the storms…”

elementix / Alamy Stock Photo

Joel Kontinen

Exoplanets are strange. They are not meant for life. But God has made the Earth in check so that life can continue on Earth.

"In the past month, Earth experienced some of its shortest days on record. The planet spun quickly enough to shave 1.4 milliseconds off of its usual 24-hour day. These natural accelerations in Earth’s spin are, of course, hard to notice. But if you’re anything like me, the feeling that our world is spinning out of control – metaphorically, at least – might not be unfamiliar.

The straightforward effects of the sun rising and setting ever-more frequently are easy to imagine. How many of us already feel as if there’s not enough time in the day? In Circular Motion, the characters are increasingly overworked, struggling to keep up with the demands of everyday life while their days keep shortening on them. Because their productivity relies on a high-speed global transport system that is itself the cause of the planet’s acceleration in the book, their rushing only makes the problem worse.”

By Alex Foster 2025 Alex Foster on his new novel, which imagines what it would feel like to be on a planet spinning out of control | New Scientist 1 August 

The secret to what makes colours pop on dazzling songbirds

 

Image courtesy of Daniel Field

Joel Kontinen

Why are songbirds so colorful?

Hidden layers of colour in the plumage of tanagers and some other songbirds explain what makes them so eye-catching.

Brightly coloured songbirds called tanagers are so eye-catching because they have a hidden layer of black or white beneath their dazzling plumage.

Painters often prime a canvas with a layer of white to enhance the colours they will eventually layer on, as well as to make it smoother and stronger. But it seems this is a mechanism that birds were using long before humans picked up paintbrushes.

Rosalyn Price-Waldman at Princeton University and her colleagues have found that when songbirds in the tanager genus Tangara have bright red or yellow plumage, they usually have white layers hidden underneath. When they have blue plumage, they have black layers beneath.

To investigate why, they removed 72 feathers from taxidermied tanager specimens in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s collection.

By taking pictures of the feathers on different backgrounds, the team measured how their reflectance or absorption of light changed, finding that the underlayers make the top layers look more colourful.

Source: 

Chris Simms 2025 The secret to what makes colours pop on dazzling songbirds | New Scientist 23 July