Scientists find best evidence yet, that icy moon Enceladus is habitable

 

The Cassini spacecraft took this image while looking across the south pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus on Nov. 30, 2010. Jets of water from the moon's underground ocean are visible bursting through cracks in the ice. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Joel Kontinen

An ocean flowing beneath the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus is spewing ice that holds the building blocks of life.

Scientists have discovered that the molecular building blocks needed for life are "readily available" on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.

At only 314 miles (505 kilometers) wide, Enceladus — and thanks to its liquid water, hydrothermal energy source and chemical tool kit, it has the potential to host extraterrestrial life.

Twenty years ago, NASA's Cassini spacecraft discovered evidence that a vast salty ocean hidden beneath Enceladus' surface was spitting out minuscule "ice grains" through cracks near the moon's south pole. Subsequent studies have spotted five of the six essential elements for life — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus (only missing sulfur) — within these grains.

Twenty years ago, NASA's Cassini spacecraft discovered evidence that a vast salty ocean hidden beneath Enceladus' surface was spitting out minuscule "ice grains" through cracks near the moon's south pole. Subsequent studies have spotted five of the six essential elements for life — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus (only missing sulfur) — within these grains.

However, the majority of these past studies looked at the relatively old ice grains that settled in Saturn's E ring — a diffuse ring outside the planet's bright main rings — after being ejected decades or centuries prior. This meant scientists couldn't be sure that the compounds truly came from Enceladus rather than from space weathering in the ring.

 But if there is life on Enceladus, it has to be created. Only Darwinists think that life can come from naturalistic ways.

 Source:

 Sophie Berdugo 2025 Scientists find best evidence yet that icy moon Enceladus is habitable | Live Science October 2

Rogue planet gains 6 billion tonnes per second in record growth spurt

Artist’s impression of Cha 1107-7626, a rogue planet about 620 light years away. Image courtesy of ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser

Joel Kontinen

A free-floating planet has been seen devouring astonishing amounts of matter, hinting that stars and planets are more alike than we thought.

A ravenous rogue planet has been caught eating 6 billion tonnes of gas and dust per second. This behaviour blurs the line between planets and stars, suggesting both can form in similar ways.

Rogue planets, free-floating balls of gas unattached to any parent star, appear to be extremely common, and may even exceed the number of stars we see in the galaxy. But astronomers still don’t understand whether they form like planets in orbit around a star and are then banished to wander the galaxy alone, or if they can form like stars by themselves.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Rogue planet gains 6 billion tonnes per second in record growth spurt | New Scientist 2 October 

Exceptional star is the most pristine object known in the universe

 

The Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, where the near-pristine star SDSS J0715-7334 was spotted. Image courtesy of Josh Lake/NASA/ESA   

Joel Kontinen

A star found in the Large Magellanic Cloud is remarkably unpolluted by heavier elements, suggesting it is descended from the universe’s earliest stars.

A relatively nearby star that appears to lack almost any of the heavy elements produced by supernovae could be a direct descendant of the very first stars that formed in the universe.

That is, according to evolution that states that God was not needed, and the planets just appeared from nowhere.

Astronomers think the first stars were made up of only the hydrogen and helium that were floating around after the big bang. It was only when these stars ran out of fuel and exploded in a supernova that elements heavier than helium were spread around. The leftover, element-rich gas from these initial explosions then formed the next generation of stars, with the cycle repeating to eventually produce all the elements we see in the stars and planets today.

 Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Exceptional star is the most pristine object known in the universe | New Scientist 3 October 

NASA's asteroid deflection test had unexpected and puzzling outcome

 

Illustration showing NASA’s DART probe, upper right, on course to strike the asteroid Dimorphos, left, which orbits Didymos. Image courtesy of Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA/AP/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

The DART mission achieved its goal of changing one asteroid’s orbit around another, but questions remain about why the orbit continued to alter over the following month.

Space has its secrets.

After NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, its orbit slowly but surely changed over the next month, and astronomers can’t explain why.

In 2022, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) flew a nearly-600-kilogram satellite into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits a larger one called Didymos.

Before the impact, Dimorphos completed an orbit every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Observations soon after revealed that the collision had reduced the orbital period by about 30 minutes, but in the following weeks and months, the orbit shrank even further, by another 30 seconds.

Source: 

Alex Wilkins 2025 NASA's asteroid deflection test had unexpected and puzzling outcome | New Scientist 1 October 

Astronomers captured an incredible view of M87’s black hole jet

 

Image courtesy of Jan Röder; Maciek Wielgus et al. (2025)

Joel Kontinen

A galaxy termed M87 at a distanced of 50 million light years from us has a black hole that spewed out an extremely hot jet of superheated plasma.

We have studied it for a century, we are only now seeing it in great detail.

More than a century ago, astronomer Heber Curtis spotted the first black hole jet – a vast stream of superheated plasma from the supermassive behemoth that sits at the centre of galaxy M87. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has observed this jet in extreme detail.

Since it was first spotted in 1918, the jet from M87’s black hole – which was famously the first black hole to be imaged in 2019 – has been observed by a multitude of telescopes and is arguably the most studied black hole jet. However, many of its features still elude explanation, such as several bright-shining regions, as well darker helix-shaped regions. Astronomers think these are likely to be caused by the jet beam refocusing or different strands recombining as it encounters new material, such as a denser, gassy region. But the underlying mechanisms remain mysterious.

Source: 

Alex Wilkins 2025 Astronomers captured an incredible view of M87’s black hole jet | New Scientist 30 September 

'Rare' ancestor reveals how huge flightless birds made it to faraway lands

 

Joel Kontinen

Do evolutionists believe in fossils or millions of years? Flightless birds could not travel to far away places. Yet they are found in six landmasses separated by oceans.

One idea was that the ancestors of this group of birds, known as paleognaths, just walked to those locations when most of the planet was harnessed together as the supercontinent Pangaea (320 million to 195 million years ago) and that, when this giant landmass split up, the birds were already in those locations.

The trouble is, the timing for that hypothesis is wrong. Pangaea had broken up by about 195 million years ago, creating the continents we know today. However, genetic studies have indicated that the last common ancestor of these paleognaths lived about 79.6 million years ago and that they divided into the main lineages we know today between about 70 million and 62 million years ago.

To work out what happened, Klara Widrig, a vertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and her colleagues analyzed a specimen of the ancient paleognath Lithornis promiscuous. Although it lived around 59 to 56 million years ago, it is the oldest fossil palaeognath found in such pristine condition.

So in this area, fossils rule the time, when flightless birds evolved. However, if God created them at the beginning, then this surveys is foolish.

Source:

Chris Simms 2025 Huge flightless birds live the world over. Now we know how they got there —and it has to do with a 'rare' ancestor | Live Science September 17

Did a star blow up and hit Earth "10 million years" ago?

 

Image courtesy of muratart/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, did a supernova blow up some 10 millions years ago?

There are signs deep beneath the Pacific Ocean that an exploding star once sent cosmic rays blasting out towards Earth, and now we have an idea of which stars may be to blame have sent cosmic rays hurtling at Earth, ang star may have sent cosmic shrapnel flying to hit Earth 10 million years ago, and astronomers have now in arrowed down the most likely culprits behind this interstellar incident.

Earlier this year, Dominik Koll at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany and his colleagues discovered a spike of radioactive beryllium buried in metallic rocks 5 kilometres beneath the Pacific Ocean, which they dated to just over 10 million years old. This form of beryllium is produced only when cosmic rays smash into Earth’s atmosphere, so Koll and his team theorised that one possible cause could be from a supernova that exploded long ago.

Source: 

Alex Wilkins 2025 Did a star blow up and hit Earth 10 million years ago? | New Scientist 26 September 

We finally found the hot wind coming out of our black hole

 

Molecular gas and X-ray emission around Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s black hole. Image courtesy of Mark D. Gorski et al. (CC BY 4.0)

Joel Kontinen

Some scientists have found a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy:

We have found hot wind blasting out from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole for the first time, which could help us understand its mysterious inactivity.

Compared to many other supermassive black holes that lie at the centres of galaxies, our black hole, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, is relatively quiet. It doesn’t shoot out vast, powerful jets like black holes in many other galaxies do, which are so bright we can spot them even in the earliest moments of the universe. But all supermassive black holes, including Sgr A*, are thought to produce winds – wafts of hot gas blasted out from near the black hole’s event horizon, where gas is swirling and violently heating up.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Sagittarius A*: We finally found the hot wind coming out of our black hole | New Scientist 24 September

Dinosaur found with a crocodile in its jaws named as new species

 

Artist’s reconstruction of dinosaur Joaquinraptor casali. Image courtesy of Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Joel Kontinen

Crocodiles are living fossils that are with us today. The dinosaur that nibbled it lived some 66 million years ago, before the extinction of the dinosaurs. That is what some evolutionists say.

A dinosaur that may have been one of the fiercest of the Cretaceous period has been excavated in South America – with an extinct crocodile’s leg in its jaws.

The remains of the dinosaur, named Joaquinraptor casali – a species of megaraptor that is new to science – were discovered in the headwaters of the Rio Chico river in Patagonia, Argentina, in 2019.

Now, Lucio Ibiricu at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Chubut, Argentina, and his colleagues have studied the fossil in detail, and were surprised by what they found in the mouth of the near-complete skull.

“The humerus, or legbone, of an extinct crocodile relative was between the jaws of Joaquinraptor and directly in contact with the teeth,” says Ibiricu. “This discovery is suggesting, though not proving, that the new megaraptor may have been eating the crocodyliform [the clade that modern crocodiles belong to] when it died.”

The researchers are still studying the crocodile’s humerus to determine how big it may have been, but preliminary work suggests it was large, says Ibiricu.

In addition to recovering most of the dinosaur’s skull, the team also excavated its vertebrae, feet, two claws, and an arm, leg and hand. The thumb claw, which is the size of a human forearm, would have been able to tear open the soft tissue of its prey, says Ibiricu.

Other megaraptoran fossils have been found in Asia, Australia and elsewhere in South America, but J. casali is the first to be found by scientists that lived so close to the end of the Cretaceous period and, also, one of the most complete.

The team determined the dinosaur would have been at least 19 years old when it died, based on the microstructure of its tibia. It also would have been about 7 metres long and weighed at least a tonne.

While Tyrannosaurus rex would have been larger and had a bigger head, J. casali had larger, more muscular arms, says Ibiricu. But both would probably have been the apex predators in their respective environments, he says.

 Source:

James Woodford 2025 Dinosaur found with a crocodile in its jaws named as new species | New Scientist 23 September 

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 

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 

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 

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 

  

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

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 

 

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 

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

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

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

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 

  

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

 

  

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 

Long-lost sailback shark rediscovered after more than 50 years

 

An adult female sailback houndshark. Image courtesy of  Jack Sagumai et al. (2025)

Joel Kontinen

Some sharks have been hidden for more than 50 years but now it has been found in Papua New Guinea.

The rare sailback houndshark, which has an unusually large dorsal fin, was first described by scientists in 1973. That was the last record of its existence, until now.

Adorned with a curiously large and deep dorsal fin, the sailback houndshark (Gogolia filewoodi) was first described by scientists in 1973, when a pregnant female shark was caught in Papua New Guinea’s Astrolabe Bay, near the Gogol River. This single animal remained the only record of the species for decades.

Jack Sagumai at the World Wildlife Fund-Pacific in Papua New Guinea and his colleagues were gathering fisheries data directly from local communities as part of a project supporting the country’s National Plan of Action on Sharks and Rays. In March 2020, they received quite the surprise: photographs of multiple small sharks caught near the mouth of the Gogol River, all under a meter long and with a pronounced dorsal fin.

Source: 

Jake Buehler 2025 Long-lost sailback shark rediscovered after more than 50 years | New Scientist 26 August

 

Evolutionists believe they are unlocking how frozen microbes stay alive for 100,000 years

 

Some Archaea microorganisms can survive in extreme conditions inside Siberia. Image courtesy of Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Microbes found buried deep in Siberian permafrost may be able to survive over extremely long timescales using protein repair genes

Microbes isolated from Siberian permafrost appear to have remained alive for more than 100,000 years, based on an analysis of their DNA. Their genetic overlap with other species suggests such astonishingly long lifespans may be widespread among the closest living relatives of all organisms with complex cells.

Other microbes have been isolated from extremely ancient marine sediments – some more than 100 million years old – but it remains unclear whether individual organisms can survive over those stretches of time. “I can’t run an experiment that long,” says Karen Lloyd at the University of Southern California. “[Time] is the weirdest variable to work with.”

 Source:

James Dinneen 2025 We are unlocking how frozen microbes stay alive for 100,000 years | New Scientist 25 August

Fewer than half the calories grown on farms now reach our plates

 

Augustine Bin Jumat/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

In 2020, the world produced more than enough calories to feed the global population, but only half of those calories reached people’s plates due to rising meat and biofuel production.

When do we run out of food? The world produced enough calories in 2020 to feed 15 billion people – but only 50 per cent of those calories ended up reaching people’s plates. This proportion is now very likely to have fallen even lower because of the declining efficiency of the global food system.

Rising production of meat – especially beef – and biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are the main reasons for this increasing inefficiency, according to Paul West at the University of Minnesota and his colleagues. Shifting to healthier diets and reducing biofuel production could increase food availability when do we without requiring more farmland.

Source:

Michael Le Page 2025 Fewer than half the calories grown on farms now reach our plates | New Scientist 25 August 

There might be a 'Planet Y' hiding in the outer solar system

 Image courtesy of Peter Jurik/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Are there unseen planets in our solar system?

"Somewhere at the edge of the solar system a new Earth-sized world might be lurking, dubbed Planet Y.

Astronomers have long proposed that there might be hidden planets beyond the Kuiper belt, a region of icy objects that is home to Pluto. Some of the more famous suggestions include Planet X, a hypothesised world about seven times the mass of Earth orbiting around 50 times the Earth-sun distance – now mostly debunked – and Planet Nine, which would be 10 times the mass of Earth and at least 300 times further from the sun than our planet and which remains a promising possibility."

Source:

Jonathan O’Callaghan 2025 There might be a 'Planet Y' hiding in the outer solar system | New Scientist 21 August

What was the first human species?

 

Image courtesy of The Natural History Museum via Alamy

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, the first human species saw daylight roughly 300,000 years ago.

 Modern humans emerged roughly, but our genus Homo is much older. So what's the oldest human species on record?

“All humans today are members of the modern human species Homo sapiens — Latin for "knowing man." But we're far from the only humans who ever existed. Fossils are revealing more and more about early humans in the genus Homo — ancestors like Homo erectus (Latin for "upright man"), who lived in Africa, Asia, the parts of Europe between 1.9 million and 110,000 years ago.

Various species of Australopithecus lived from about 4.4 million to 1.4 million years ago. It may be that H. habilis evolved directly from the species Australopithecus afarensis — the best-known example of which is "Lucy," who was unearthed at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974.

The fossils of our genus are usually distinguished from Australopithecus fossils by Homo's distinctively smaller teeth and a relatively large brain, which led to the greater use of stone tools.

But White noted that traits like smaller teeth and bigger brains must have emerged at times in the Australopithecus populations that early Homo evolved from."

Source:

Tom Metcalfe  2025 What was the first human species? | Live Science August 16

Ceres may have been habitable at just "half a billion years" old

 

Image courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution the dwarf planet Ceres might have been a flourishing planet and soon after its evolution the planet has been habitable. Now it is cold and icy, but according to evolutionary thinking, it may have been a flourishing planet after its formation.

Provided that intelligent design did not work, as intelligence is needed to form a habitable planet.

A billion or so years into its evolution, the icy dwarf planet Ceres may have had the right conditions to sustain life, which indicates the solar system may be more habitable than we thought

The dwarf planet Ceres looks cold and dead, but a billion or so years after its formation, it may have had a warm interior that made it habitable.

Sam Courville at Arizona State University says he can’t speculate on whether life ever arose on Ceres – but had this happened, the dwarf planet’s past environment may have enabled that life to survive.

Previous research has indicated there could be water ice and organic molecules on Ceres, pointing towards the possibility of life. But in this study, the researchers focused on what these alien life forms would have eaten. They considered microbes like those that live in hydrothermal vents in Earth’s oceans and extract energy directly from chemical molecules, rather than from consuming other organisms. Could similar microbes have survived in the oceans of ancient Ceres?

The team modelled Ceres’s past on a computer, finding that when it was between half a billion and 2 billion years old, pores close to its hot core could have released fluids that then mixed with the colder water in its oceans. That process could have delivered the chemical “food” that microbes would have needed.

If we want to find evidence of past or current life in our solar system, says Amanda Hendrix at the Planetary Science Institute, we need to look to worlds like Ceres that have – or once had – oceans.

Strikingly, the type of microbial life support that the team identified could also have occurred on other Ceres-sized icy objects. It may mean more planets than we expected could be habitable at some point in their evolution.

“If Ceres was habitable in the past, then probably there are tens of asteroids and moons that were also habitable in the past. And if you can keep them hot, maybe [they are] still habitable today,” says team member Joe O’Rourke, also at Arizona State University.

Habitability thus might be “a natural consequence of putting the right ingredients together, which seem to be the common ingredients in the solar system”, says Courville.

But many details remain to be ironed out, even just for Ceres. The researchers say their model would benefit from a precise chemical analysis of minerals on the planet’s surface, some of which may have been brought up by underground flows. But no spacecraft that might be able to collect them has ever landed on Ceres.

 Source:

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan 2025 Ceres may have been habitable at just half a billion years old | New Scientist 20 August 

Fossilized fish trails reveal earliest steps out of water

An artist’s rendition of an ancient lungfish squirming up onto land. Image courtesy of  Jakub Zalewski

Joel Kontinen

Evolution proposes that about 400 million years ago, vertebrates were confined to the sea. Fish did not evolve limbs adapted for walking on land.

A new study published in Scientific Reports has report in which the earliest version of fossil evidence from the sea to land by 10 million years in advance.

If this is true, the earliest migration will be out of the water on land by at least 10 million years.

The trace fossils closely resemble trails left by modern lungfish as they drag themselves across exposed shores, says Piotr Szrek, a paleontologist at the Polish Geological Institute and lead author of the study.

Possible lungfish tracks could push back animal migration onto land by 10 million years.

The new fossils were unearthed during excavations in 2021 in the Holy Cross Mountains in Poland, about 190 kilometers south of Warsaw.

Source:

Taylor Mitchell Brown 2025 Fossilized fish trails reveal earliest steps out of water | Science | AAAS 15 August

Unprecedented Arctic heatwave melted 1 per cent of Svalbard's ice

 

Image courtesy of Xinhua/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Global warming has struck Svalbard. During the summer of 2024, a record number of ice melted on Svalbard.

During the summer of 2024, six weeks of record-smashing heat led to a record-obliterating amount of ice melting on the islands of Svalbard in the Arctic. By the end of the summer, 1 per  melted on cent of all the land ice on the archipelago had been lost – enough to raise the global average sea level by 0.16 millimetres.

“It was very shocking,” says Thomas Schuler at the University of Oslo in Norway. “It was not just elted a marginal record. The melt was almost twice as high as in the previous record.”

More than half of Svalbard is covered in ice. Winter snowfall adds to the ice, while the flow of glaciers into the sea and surface melting during summer leads to ice loss.

Schuler’s team has been using a combination of on-site measurements, satellite data and computer modelling to estimate how the total mass of ice on the archipelago is changing.

Since 1991, less than 10 gigatonnes of ice has melted during each summer, on average. But four of the past five years have set new records for summer ice loss. Altogether, the team estimates that around 62 gigatonnes of ice were lost last summer, almost entirely due to surface melting rather than ice flow into the sea.

By Michael Le Page 2025 Unprecedented Arctic heatwave melted 1 per cent of Svalbard's ice | New Scientist 18 August